Participating in the Swiss Open Source Software Conference

Next 1st and 2nd of April I'm going to be attending in the in the Swiss Open Source Software Conference in Bern.

On 2nd of April there are two sessions on Openbravo ERP in the conference business track:

• 13:30 Openbravo ERP: Open Source ERP for professional business by Walter Demichiel, Director of DW-Net.
  
• 14.30 Building an open source community: the Openbravo experience by Jordi Mas from Openbravo.

Walter Demichiel is the Direktor DW-Net, a partner of Openbravo. He will focus his talk in Openbravo as a professional solution for business.

I will be focusing my talk on Openbravo community, specially in the latest initiatives that we have been developing and how you can contribute to the Openbravo ecosystem.

Openbravo ERP & POS projects have a new home

Hello everybody!

Openbravo ERP & POS projects have a new home:

• Openbravo ERP is located at http://forge.openbravo.com/projects/openbravoerp
• Openbravo POS is located at http://forge.openbravo.com/projects/openbravopos
  

We have completed the users and forum posts migration that we have previously announced, all the previous forum activity has been migrated to the new Openbravo Forge

The new home includes a complete new forum system with many new features. If you have question regarding the usage of the new Forge, please use the public support forum for Openbravo Forge.

Openbravo ERP & Openbravo POS 28th of March projects migration details & tool map

The Openbravo migration to the new Forge will occur Saturday 28th of March starting at 7.00am GMT+1 and it expecting to be completed by 14.00 GMT+1. During this period of time it will not be possible to create new forum messages in the Openbravo ERP & POS forums. The objective of this process is to migrate all the forum posts from SourceForge to the new Forge.

The people working on the migration will be using the Openbravo IRC as communication channel. That is as you know:

Server: irc.freenode.net
Channel name: #openbravo

You are more details in out Wiki about Openbravo chat channels.

On account synchronization

In case that your SourceForge username does not match with your Openbravo Single Sign on username, your previous activity in SourceForge will not be preserved. This is not desirable since you will loose all the recognition of the activity that you have previously generated and its ownership. For example, in my case my user at SourceForge is jordimash but in our Single Sign On system is just jordimas. I'm interested in having my previous activity generated as jordimash mapped to my new Single Sign On user jordimas. If you are in this case, write your details in our Migration Account List and we will do the mapping for your account

Openbravo ERP core project tool map

• Project home page -> Openbravo ERP project at Openbravo Forge
• Project News -> Openbravo ERP project news (using the new Forge, active after the migration)
  
• Wiki -> Openbravo Wiki
• Forums -> Openbravo ERP forums in the Openbravo Forge (using the new Forge, active after the migration)
  
• Downloads -> SourceForge downloads
• Mailing lists -> SourceForge mailing lists
• Source Control System -> Openbravo Code (Mercurial repository)
• Bug tracking system -> Openbravo Issues
  

Openbravo POS core project tool map

• Project home page -> Openbravo POS project at Openbravo Forge
• Project News -> Openbravo POS project news (using the new Forge, active after the migration)
• Wiki -> Openbravo Wiki
• Forums -> Openbravo POS forums in the Openbravo Forge (active after the migration)
• Downloads -> SourceForge downloads
  
• Source Control System -> Openbravo Dev (Subversion repository)
  
• Bug tracking system -> Openbravo Issues

If you want to see the new forums, have a look to the Support forum for example. Feel free to post here any question that you have.

What's new in Openbravo Forge for Openbravo ERP and Openbravo POS forum users

As I commented recently this Saturday we are going to migrate the Openbravo POS and ERP projects to the new and shiny Openbravo Forge. This means that starting this Saturday 28th of March, Openbravo community is going to use the forums provided by the platform.

Having new forums has been a long time requested feature by our community and we are very happy to be able to answer.

Let me highlight some of the new features that the forums have compared to the ones used until now in SourceForge:

· HTML messages with a full WYIWYG editor. This includes obviously the possibility to use formatted text, images and links. A new world compared to the old plain regular text
· Attachments. Now it is possible to attach files to messages, ranging from logs to screenshots. This is handy when you need help debugging problems or users want to share results.
· Sticky messages. This is really useful for forums that want to highlight a new message to all the newcomers. For example, a FAQ built from the activity of the message, a very hot issue of the week, a reminder to all participants, etc.
· Google indexing. As you have noticed Google does not index SourceForge content. This is specially bad for the forums because it is a very important source of knowledge for Openbravo ERP and POS projects. With the new Openbravo Forge, all the content is indexed by Google, what makes one of our more important knowledge assets fully available to everyone easing the search and resolution of Openbravo related issues.

If you want to see the new forums, have a look to the Support forum for example. Feel free to post here any question that you have.

Tomorrow I will blog about the detailed migration schedule for the Openbravo POS and ERP projects that is taking place this Saturday to 28th of March.

Openbravo Community voting period starts

Openbravo community has already nominated the top candidates for the Community Awards. Of those nominated by the Openbravo community, we have assembled a list of individuals and organizations. Please take note that these nominees were compiled through an open nomination process. We have rephrased some of the nominees’ descriptions, provided additional links, and merged duplicate entries.


The voting process has started and will be open until the 31st of March.

Make your opinion count by voting for the people and organizations that have made a difference to you.

The Community Awards will be granted to the winners during a special Openbravo World Conference session on 19th April, 2009.

For questions or comments regarding the voting process, don’t hesitate to contact me: jmas at openbravo.com

Introducing Openbravo Forge

During the last months we have been working on easing the development and customization of Openbravo ERP. As part from this effort, modularity has been rolled out for Openbravo ERP R2.50, along with the central repository that holds the modules developed for Openbravo ERP. To complement all these initiatives for fuelling the creation of a dynamic ecosystem, today we are presenting the Openbravo Forge.

Openbravo Forge is a collaboration platform where third parties can independently develop projects which are synergistic with Openbravo software, therefore increasing the number of solutions available to the Openbravo ecosystem.

The Openbravo Forge objectives are to:

• Provide an infrastructure for community members to develop verticals, plug-ins and localizations
• Provide an infrastructure for partners and custom development to privately develop verticals, plug-ins and localizations
• Provide a way to recognize peoples' contributions and make them visible
• Host the central repository and the modularity repository (Openbravo Forge is key to developing modularity, which is introduced in Openbravo ERP R2.50).
• Allow people to place their own ads linking to web-stores to sell licenses and/or support (people can place a little ad and link in their projects)
• Provide a directory of available projects for Openbravo ERP & POS
• Provide a member directory
  

It is important to notice that all community members will be able to use this infrastructure for free for any open source product.

The services that we provide for projects are forums, news, downloads, bug tracking, Subversion, Wiki and central repository modules, and obliviously to list them in the projects directory. All these services are independent and not connected to the tools that we use for the core (Openbravo Wiki, Issues and Mercurial). Forge is not an infrastructure to develop Openbravo ERP or POS for which we use Openbravo Issues, Openbravo Wiki and Mercurial services, but will rather provide community services. For Openbravo ERP & POS projects, think of the Forge as a replacement for our current SourceForge services. In case you still have doubts, there is a document that explains how the ecosystem toolmap will look after the migration.

We expect Openbravo community to embrace the Forge, especially to develop extensions and localizations. You can use your already existing accounts for Openbravo Wiki or Openbravo Mantis to login, since Openbravo Forge is connected to our Single Sign On infrastructure. If you have any issue logging in, please let us know at migration@openbravo.com

We think that Openbravo Forge is a tool that will provide tremendous value to our community and we will keep working on it throughout 2009 by having two major releases during this year and a few minor updates. We have some really cool features like Google Gadgets or RSS feeds at site and project level.

Openbravo ERP & POS Migration plans

Today we are entering the soft launch phase of the project where we expect to collect feedback from all of you.

Openbravo Forge is also is going to be the new home for Openbravo ERP and POS projects, replacing SourceForge services. On Saturday 28th of March, we will migrate all the forum messages for Openbravo ERP and POS projects to the new Forge. Starting from that date, http://forge.openbravo.com will be the home for these projects.

In case that your SourceForge username does not match with your Openbravo Single Sign on username, your previous activity in SourceForge will not be preserved. This is not desirable since you will loose all the recognition of the activity that you have previously generated and its ownership. If you are in this case, write your details in our Migration Account List and we will do the mapping for your account.

If you have any questions or issues, we have a public project to support our community in Forge related issues. If you think the answer to your question could be of interest to others, I’d ask you to post it in the project's forum.

During the next days we will blogging about the Forge, how it should be used, and we will keep you updated.

My Openbravo Community Awards nominations

As you know already know we are running the Openbravo Community Awards organized and sponsored by Openbravo to honor individuals and companies for their outstanding contributions to the Openbravo ERP and POS projects.

The nomination period is open. Please nominate the people in the Openbravo Community that have made a difference to you.

I have nominated many people. However, I want to highlight some people and organizations that under my opinion (subjective obviously) made important contributions:

• Jens Wilke, for his work on Openbravo2PO and the initial German translation and chart of accounts. Jens' work on Openbravo2PO set the ground of our a tool that is part of our translator's toolset today. On top of that, we did the first translation of Openbravo to German, identifying issues that after clean the path to other folks.
• Enric Alegre. He has been one of the strongest supporters in the Openbravo forums with 165 forums messages during 2008. Thanks for helping everyone to succeed in Openbravo community. He also is cooperating with the local government as part of our academia program to introduce Openbravo to students.
• Victor Gaspar for starting the idea and contribute some of the Code Snippets, pieces of code that you can reuse in different places.
• The Software Engineering Research Center in Pakistan is one of our members of the Openbravo academia program. They are teaching Openbravo there, contributing to Core with bug fixes and working regularly with the development community. A good example of how the academia world and open source software can work very well.
  
• Mancomun.org, an initiative from the government of Galicia to promote free software. They have localized Openbravo ERP (partially) and Openbravo POS to Galician language.
  

Remember to nominate your our candidates and make your opinion count.

Openbravo Community awards: nomination period starts

The Openbravo Community awards are organized and sponsored by Openbravo to honor individuals and companies for their outstanding contributions to the Openbravo ERP and POS projects. The standards for companies and organizations are higher than for individuals and are proportionate to their level of resources.

Participation for the awards takes place in two phases, so please keep in mind the following dates:

• March 2nd- 16th: Candidate nomination period. This is the time where you can nominate people and companies that you think have done an important job for the Openbravo ecosystem in each of the categories defined. You can also nominate yourself and the company you work for.
  
  
• March 20th-31st: Candidates published and voting period open. This is the time where you can vote for the selected nominees for every category.
  

As of now, you can start nominating the people in the Openbravo Community that have made a difference to you.

Can you think of someone that has been especially helpfully in the forums?
Can you think of a blog or documentation with Openbravo as the main topic which has been useful to you?
How about relevant localization efforts that have been beneficial to you?


Now is the time for you to honor unsung heroes!

Everyone can nominate their favorite candidates for each category. At the end of the process, a list of accepted candidates matching the selection criteria will be compiled for every category.

Participate and make your voice count!

For questions or comments regarding the voting process, don’t hesitate to contact me: jmas at openbravo.com