Jordi Mas at Openbravo

Using Openbravo Forge to develop extensions

2009-06-29T00:33:00.000-07:00

Introduction

This post describes the best practices and polices to apply in Openbravo Forge to develop and organize an extension. These are a simplified version of the same guidelines that we use to develop Openbravo ERP core project plus some specific guidelines for the Openbravo Forge usage.

Let's start by defining some key concepts:

Module: provides an atomic functionality. Examples of modules are reports, connectors, functional extensions, etc.
Pack: group all the modules necessary to enable Openbravo ERP for a mean. For example, a vertical pack that collects all the modules required to enable Openbravo ERP for a specific industry.
Template: a configuration file plus a collection of packs and modules

Documentation

Before starting any development, we recommend to create a set of documentation that will guide the development and will help users in the future to understand what the module achieves.

We recommend to have the following documentation:

A Main Page that serves as an entry point to the projects' documentation and describes its objective and links to the related documentation.
A Functional Specification that describes the functional requirements, use cases and other documentation that describe the needs that the module is willing to cover.
A Technical Documentation that covers all the technical aspects to be taken into consideration when developing the module (such as database structure, etc).

You can take a reference the Human Capital Module to better understand how to organize this documentation.

Source Control System

Developers can use the source control system of their choice. Openbravo Forge provides Subversion as source control system. The instructions given in this section apply only to Subversion, including the recommended repository structure for Openbravo modules. You can leverage on your source control system specific features for branching and tagging.

The following is a list of common terminology used when working with Subversion:

Subversion client. Software run by a user to access a Subversion server also called Subversion repository.

Subversion repository. The Subversion server stores a copy of the files of the project. The server retains both the most recent version and every historical version (past changes). * Trunk. Development with Subversion progresses similar to a tree. The main development occurs against the trunk.
Branch. A split of development off of the trunk or another branch. Branches allow developments to diverge either permanently or temporarily.
Tag. A tag or label refers to an important snapshot in time, consistent across many files. These files at that point may all be tagged with a user-friendly, meaningful name or revision number.

Recommended Repository Structure for Openbravo Modules

Openbravo recommends following structure when organizing the source code of your module:

project_name
* tags
* trunk
* branches

When developing a module, the main development activity occurs in the main development trunk.

All developers commit the changes against this branch. When a version is reach, a tag should be done.

If you want to work with a stable version you usually download the tagged version (a released version) and if you want to follow the development you download trunk.

We recommended the Version Control with Subversion free on-line book.

Registering Modules

As a prerequisite to publish modules into the Central Repository, you have to first register them.

This a list of recommendations when registering modules within the Central Repository from Openbravo ERP:

Use the field help to give precise instructions on how to use the module once is installed. For example, the required steps to access it from Openbravo ERP menu.

Do not leave the URL field in blank, provide the project's web where users can find more information about your product.
Do not leave the author's field in blank. It should be clear to the user who the author is.
Package name. Use the standard package name naming conventions from Java, for example com.yourcompany.project. The package name org.openbravo is reserved for Openbravo as a company.
If you are registering a module, use the same Single Sign-on username to register and then to associate it.
Do not use the name of the client in the code or in the module definition
It is fine to develop in other languages than English but the language of the module must be set accordingly
If the module has been tested only in one database (Oracle or PostgreSQL), you might want to add that as a note in the module description ("This module should be data base independent; however it has been tested only on Oracle | PostgreSQL").

Creating Packs
Packs
When creating a pack project in Openbravo Forge, we recommend to enable the following services in Openbravo Forge:

Module: to publish the pack in the central repository
Forums: to discuss issues for the functionality that the pack targets
Wiki: to document the configuration and link to the rest of the resources

We suggest to discard the usage of the rest of the services that the Forge provides.

Additionally, we recommend:

Since a pack groups modules, they should not contain code, and as result, they should not require a source control system.
We recommend to report issues, using the bug tracking system, to each particular module instead of reporting to a pack.
We only recommend to publish files in the download area during the development cycle, you post your obx file in progress in the download area for early adopters to download and evaluate. We do not recommend to publish the files in the download service once they are released since you can already download files published in the central repository.
When registering the project, assign it to the Openbravo ERP -> Packs category.

Module

When creating a module in Openbravo Forge, we recommend to enable the following services:

Module: to publish the module in the central repository
Code: to develop the code of the module and be able to work in a collaborative manner with other developers
Bug Tracking: to allow users to report issues or functionality enhancements
Wiki: to document the configuration and link to the rest of the resources

For modules, we suggest to discard the usage of the rest of the services that the Forge provides.

Additionally, we recommend:

We only recommend to publish files in the download area during the development cycle, you post your obx file in progress in the download area for early adopters to download and evaluate. We do not recommend to publish the files in the download service once they are released since you can already download files published in the central repository.
When registering the project, assign it to the Openbravo ERP -> Modules category.

Template

A template is a configuration file plus a collection of packs and modules. We recommend to enable the following services in Openbravo Forge:

Module: to publish the template in the central repository
Code: to develop the configuration file
Forums: to discuss about the template
Bug Tracking: to track issues with the configuration file
Wiki: to document the configuration and link to the rest of the resources

Additional Information

Openbravo ERP development guide that includes all the documentation on how to develop extensions

Contributing to Openbravo ERP QA efforts

2009-06-26T01:05:00.000-07:00

Introduction

Quality Assurance is key for having successful software products. Openbravo projects follow an open development process that allows everybody to take part in any part of the development process. Let me describe how you can get involved in the Quality Assurance processes for Openbravo ERP.

Before getting started we recommend that you read the following documents to get familiar with the main Openbravo development concepts and processes:

Development Process Management. Describes the Openbravo development process from a management perspective.
Openbravo Releases. Describes Openbravo releases and versions.

Openbravo testing methodologies

At Openbravo the following testing methodologies are combined to assurance the product's quality:

Test cases: These area a set of well defined steps, execution preconditions, and expected results to exercise a particular program scenario or to verify compliance with a specific requirement. For managing test cases TestLink is used.
Automated testing at Openbrav o to automate the testing of Openbravo ERP using test cases.
Unit testing using pieces of code that verify that functionality of different Openbravo ERP components. Currently in early stage using JUnit.

How you can help

Testing early releases

In the Openbravo ERP Early Releases Discussion forum we announce new alpha and beta versions that people can help to test.

Things that you can do to help:

Verify that bugs that this release addresses have been fixed.
Executing test cases to make sure that the functionality works.
Test the new functionality and make sure that works properly.
Reporting new issue introduced in this release.

Reporting issues on any version

Have you found a bug? Please, report it to us using our bug database. Make sure that you carefully read our Bug Reporting Guidelines before submitting your bug report.

Contributing test cases

For every release of Openbravo, at Openbravo's TestLink you have the collection of cases that are executed to verify the compliance of requirements. These test cases focus on assurance the coverage of the major use cases but not all the cases.

You can contribute by providing new test cases that you think that are important for Openbravo to include as part of our test plan (collection of cases) for every release or also cases that you think are critical for a specific module, industry or market segment.

Reaching Openbravo QA team

Tools

Openbravo Issues. Openbravo bug tracking & enhancements database.
Openbravo Code. Contains all the Openbravo ERP source code controls.
Automated build farm. Openbravo continuous integration system.
Openbravo's TestLink. Openbravo case management tool.
Continuous Integration for Openbravo ERP.

Openbravo Forge User Manual available

2009-06-24T23:25:00.000-07:00

We have published the final version of the Openbravo Forge User Manual. The manual covers the basic usage of the Openbravo Forge and its aimed to help project administrators and users on their daily use of the Forge.

The manual contains an introduction to the Forge and the services that provides, a detailed explanation of how to register projects, how users can fine tune their settings and how to use the Forge to develop, communicate and publish projects. We recommend this manual to all users using the Forge and to people willing to learn more about its capabilities.

If you have any question regarding the Openbravo Forge, do not hesitate to ask it on the Openbravo Forge forum.

Using Openbravo Forge to develop an Openbravo ERP localization

2009-05-29T07:36:00.000-07:00

Hello there,

One of the earliest adopters of the Openbravo Forge since it was launched two months ago have been the localizers. They appreciate the freedom of been able to setup their project, forums and been able to publish news, files and modules in the Central Repository (before it was necessary our assistance).

In the last weeks of experience working with localization projects on the Forge we have crafted some best practices and polices to apply in Openbravo Forge to develop and organize a localization project.

Let me share them with you.

Introduction

Many countries and regions have similar requirements, like sharing the same language or functional requirement. To be able to reuse localization components, we provide the following types of projects to enable functionality delivery:

Module: provides an atomic functionality. Examples of modules are chart of accounts, translations, banking interfaces, etc.
Pack: group all the modules necessary to enable Openbravo ERP for a country or region. For example, the Spain Localization Pack that contains a full localization package for Spain.

We recommend that:

Each country or region should create one and only one pack that contains all the relevant modules. A pack should be created for consistency sake even if it contains only one module.
Each country or region could create zero or more modules (zero if it only reuses modules and does not create any geography specific modules)

Packs

When registering your localization pack project for your region, we recommend to enable the following services in Openbravo Forge:

Module: to publish the pack in the central repository
Forums: to discuss localization issues for the region that the pack targets

For localization packs, we suggest to discard the usage of the rest of the services that the Forge provides.

Additionally, we recommend:

Since a pack groups modules, they should not contain code, and as result, they should not require a source control system.
We recommend to report issues, using the bug tracking system, to each particular module instead of reporting to a pack.
We only recommend to publish files in the download area during the development cycle, you post your obx file in progress in the download area for early adopters to download and evaluate. We do not recommend to publish the files in the download service once they are released since you can already download files published in the central repository.
When registering the project, assign it to the 'Openbravo ERP -> Localization Packs category.

Modules

When registering your localization modules, we recommend to enable the following services:

Module: to publish the module in the central repository
Code: to develop the code of the module and be able to work in a collaborative manner with other developers
Bug Tracking: to allow users to report issues or functionality enhancements
Wiki:to publish documentation for the project and to coordinate work

For localization modules, we suggest to discard the usage of the rest of the services that the Forge provides.

Additionally, we recommend:

We only recommend to publish files in the download area during the development cycle, you post your obx file in progress in the download area for early adopters to download and evaluate. We do not recommend to publish the files in the download service once they are released since you can already download files published in the central repository.
When registering the project, assign it to the 'Openbravo ERP -> Localization Modules category.

Project naming conventions

For naming localization projects we recommend the format Name of the country + Description, except for language modules that we recommend Language name + for + country.

For example, for Spain we use the following names:

Pack

Spain Localization Pack. Contains all the modules necessary to apply the localization for Spain.

Modules

Spain Chart of accounts - General. Contains the Spanish translation for Spain
Spain Taxes. Contains the definition of taxes for Spain.
Spanish for Spain. Contains the Spanish translations customized for Spain.

Package name conventions

The following table contains a description of the best practices when naming packages.

Additional links

Localization process. Recommendations on how to structure packs and develop modules.
Openbravo ERP localization forum for discussing and getting help on Openbravo ERP related localization issues.

Openbravo Wiki Archive namespace

2009-05-13T03:50:00.000-07:00

Openbravo Wiki has currently more than 2.000 articles. Many of these articles are legacy documents that belong to older versions of our projects: user manuals, design documents, old coordination documents, etc. A search in Openbravo Wiki returns as results many legacy documents that are no longer useful making more challenging for users to find the information that they are looking for. With the new categorization system, that was introduced some weeks back, the situation has improved since categories are more usable but there is still room for improvement.

To address this situation, we have created the Openbravo Wiki archive namespace. We have started to move all the articles that we consider legacy to this new namespace. The idea is to keep in the main namespace only documentation that is valid for the current stable version, Openbravo ERP R2.50 nowadays. Additionally, we have modified the search UI for Openbravo Wiki enhance the search user experience.

I think that these changes will improve greatly the experience of all users looking for information.

I want also mention that creation of new categories has been blocked. This has been done to prevent the proliferation of categories that ignored our current category system. Please, contact the Wiki administrators if you need a new category.

Openbravo Forge chat meeting on Monday 11st of May 2009

2009-05-06T22:56:00.000-07:00

Since the launch of Openbravo Forge a little more than a month ago, we have received lots of questions and ideas. During the Openbravo World Conference lots of people had questions on how the Forge can help them to be more productive and get more exposure on what they do, something that I briefly explained a few days back.

I would like to organize a chat with all of you to discuss about the Forge. Mainly to:

To solve doubts regarding the usage of the Openbravo Forge that you may have
Questions on how to develop verticals and extensions through the Forge
To answer questions regarding future plans of the Openbravo Forge
To get Feedback and ideas for future versions

The details are of the chat are:

Date: Monday 11st of May at 14.00 GMT + 1 (16.00 local time in Spain due to daylight savings). Check the World Clock if you want to check the time in your area.
Where: IRC Network FreeNode at the #openbravo channel
Language: English

I will appreciate if you can participate in the meeting if you have ideas or questions about the Forge.

Openbravo World Conference 2009 presentations available

2009-04-28T07:40:00.000-07:00

The presentations of the Openbravo World Conference 2009 have been just published.

There are also some pictures available from the event.

Enjoy!

Openbravo Community Awards winners

2009-04-21T07:44:00.000-07:00

Openbravo has organized the Openbravo Community Awards to honor individuals and companies for their outstanding contributions to the Openbravo ERP and POS projects during 2008.

Openbravo Community during the last weeks has nominated first and voted later the people that made a difference for them with their contributions. During the Openbravo World Conference, that occurred last weekend, we revealed the winners of every category.

The Individual Awards acknowledge people that have allocated time and resources to make Openbravo POS or ERP better project. The winners in the group are:

Best Quality Assurance. An individual with outstanding contributions in the area of Quality Assurance

Goes to Naveen Chanda for his participation in the Openbravo ERP 2.40 alpha 2 and 2.35 MP4 testing cycles on a number of platforms and for his active participation in Openbravo ERP forums.

Finalists: Paulo Leandro, Juan Reyes, Ville Lindfors, Jignesh, Ronny G.

Best localizer. An individual with outstanding contributions in the area of localization.

Goes to Mohammad Jaffar Fahmi for his work translating Openbravo POS to Arabic, the most popular locale for Openbravo POS.

Finalists: Kenzo Repole, Jens Wilke.

Best developer. An individual with outstanding contributions in the area of software development.

Goes to Andrej Svininykh for this work on developing several features for Openbravo POS and integrating some new devices like scales and receipt printers.

Finalists: Ville Lindfors, Ronny G, Ben Sommerville.

Best support participant. An individual with outstanding participation in Openbravo support channels.

Goes to Telepieza for his work dedicated in documenting HOWTOs for Openbravo ERP in Spanish (55 of them are currently available)‏.

Finalists: Enric Alegre, Miguel Marquez, Victor Gaspar, Jimm.

The Technology Awards recognize outstanding projects lead by companies or organizations build on top of Openbravo technology. The winners in the group are:

Best localization. An organization with outstanding contributions in the area of localization.

Goes to Amorebieta-Etxanoko Udala for leading the Euskara language translation for Openbravo POS

Finalists: CBT Open, Apal Informatique, Mancomun.org

Best implementation. An organization that has performed an outstanding implementation of Openbravo in a challenging environment.

Goes to Conasa for their work on developing and installing a vertical solution for religious services based on Openbravo ERP 2.40 with PostgreSQL.

Finalists: Qualian Technologies, Microgenesis, Open Sistemas.

Best development. An organization that has performed an outstanding development based on Openbravo.

Goes to Open Sistemas for their work developing many features, now part of Openbravo POS, aimed at the fast food business (for client Bocatta)‏.

Finalists: Open Sistemas and Software Engineering Research Center.

Open Sistemas after receiving their award

Congratulations to all the winners and nominees, everybody's contributions are important.

Thanks to everybody that has participated in the nomination and voting process.

Openbravo World Conference - Community Day 2

2009-04-20T06:55:00.000-07:00

This is a follow up of my summary of the 1st day of the community days. These are the insights from the second day of the community days. I have not summarized all the sessions as some were demos. Feel free to send me your insights if you want me to include them in this post.

Building an Open Source ERP Ecosystem through Modularity and Core Contribution. Paolo Juvara

Key ideas:

Community is a A group of people that collaborate around a common project. An ecosystem is a group of autonomous but interdependent communities that collaborate around a number of loosely coupled objectives and projects
The most significant innovation of version 2.50 of Openbravo ERP is the introduction of a modular architecture support that enables an Openbravo ecosystem very similar to the Linux ecosystem. Openbravo ERP itself is the core of the ecosystem and autonomous communities can collaborate on independent value added components.
Modularity architecture & Openbravo Forge enable the Openbravo ecosystem.
Templates to provide customized solutions for specific industry segments

The community imperative. Matt Asay

Key ideas:

Open source is now mainstream. 50% of the companies plan to adopt open source
People are attracted to Linux because cost
Open source lowers risk and probability of failure
People is planing to increase the use of open source in critical mission application
The real value for open source applications come from ISV
Community begins when self-interest meets software
An open source project should be bigger than the company

Matt Asay during his key note.

Localization: Opening New Markets and Developing Unchartered Territory. Richard Morley

Key ideas:

Localization can benefit tremendously from the Forge & modularity
Openbravo is taking the rule of the enabler putting the common ground to create any localization
Areas of prioritization for Openbravo localization efforts in the next years are : flexible Chart of Account (COA) configuration, multilingual & multicultural user interface and master data management, user interface and master data management, configurable multi-currency environment, flexible, configurable tax handling, integration to web services, transaction rounding rules, flexible transaction numbering rules, flexible, document driven, accounting rules, support for the configuration of payment methods, flexible and extensive standard reports, support for “generic” business processes. Notice that this a list of areas to work, it does not represent a commitment in terms of deliveries from Openbravo.

Modules: Best Practices. Ismael Ciordia.

Key ideas:

Modules are the atomic building blocks and deliver the individual functional extensions. They are the lowest level of granularity and the smallest element of reuse.
Packs are a collection of modules.
Templates allow you to deliver a combination of modules and packs plus a configuration file as a reusable, packaged solution that installs at the click of a button.
Dependency: a module depends on other module when it requires it to run
All changes after 2.50 should be done using modules, including customizations, to simplify modularity

Openbravo World Conference - Community Day 1

2009-04-20T00:44:00.000-07:00

Saturday was the first day of the Openbravo World Conference community days. There were around 200 attendees. Lots of conversations and ideas floating around.

In the next days we will be publishing the slides of all the sessions. Let me share with you some insights from the first day of the community days.

Word from the CEO: empowering the ecosystem. Manel Sarasa

Key ideas:

Freedom is value for partners, customers and community members
Projected the video truth happens from Red Hat to illustrate how disruptive innovative changes like open source end up been adopted
There is a failure in the ERP market due to the proprietary market tradition: complex price structures, vendor lock-in. Open source means an ERP for everybody. No company has managed to delivered a win-win proposition to the ERP middle market.
Vision: empowering the ecosystem: a modern product, 100% web based with great functionality footprint, delivered and built through freedom, with a great professional offer. It is mission critical, professional services are key to success
Some facts about Openbravo. More than 1.250.000 downloads, 5.000 registered developers, 50 localization registered projects, estimated 1.000 implementations, 100 professional partners serving 30 different countries, 100 excellent professionals

The Impact of Open Source in a Down economy. Richard Daley

Key ideas:

The time is right for the open source applications now. It has been already for open source operating system vendors like Red Hat
Open source is the safer option nowadays (lower risk)
At infrastructure tier open source has already consolidated (such as LAMP), now the application tier is consolidating. Increase ratio of adoption of open source solutions
Community participation is key for better software, more secure, more international, better supported
Lean budgets favor open source. Many open source commercial projects are seeing an increase in activity and commercial operations
Open source and cloud computing. Open source has commoditized the software industry, the cloud computing is doing the same for hardware. Cloud computing and software as a service. Benefits: pay as go, reduced operational costs, scalability and availability.

Richard Daley during his key note.

Openbravo in the Ecosystem: Integrate it into the Information System. Sandra Massé

Talend is fully integrated with Openbravo ERP allowing data extract, load and transformation with other systems to Openbravo.

Key ideas:

Talend is an open source ETL tool. Reduces the cost compared to proprietary solutions up 20 times.
900.000 product downloads, 20% registered users
Challenges: high volumes of data, heterogeneity of the environment, differences in data structures, maintain the consistency of old and new systems

The Case for Openbravo ERP on Ubuntu Server Edition. John Pugh

Canonical and Openbravo are working together to make Openbravo ERP ready for the Ubuntu Linux distribution.

Key ideas:

Contribution between operating systems and open source applications
Community is key to Canonical. LaunchPad.Net, Ubuntu collaboration platform, has more than 12.000 projects registered.
Ubuntu server edition was released two years ago and it is a good platform to deploy professional applications
Cloud computer included in next release of Ubuntu 9.04 (to be published on the 23rd of April 2009)

Expanding your Market Reach with IBM DB2. Antonio Maranhao and Boris Bialek

IBM is working with Openbravo to adapt Openbravo ERP for DB2 database engine.

Key ideas:

IBM DB2 Express edition is available free for download and has a flexible licensing scheme
IBM is working on supporting Openbravo ERP on top of DB2 database engine
DB2 has compatibility layers what makes very easy to port applications to DB2 and is highly optimized for very demanding environments

Deployment Advances from Sun for the System Integrator. Pedro Yagüe

Sun has been working with Openbravo to enhance the support for OpenSolaris and GlassFish in Openbravo ERP.

One of the largest open source vendors: every software asset we produce is open source
Sun allows to try and run their software and have special programs for startups.
Sun bases its growth with its partners. Sun's partner ecosystem is key to their succeed.
Openbravo ERP runs on GlassFish, Sun's application server and is going to be packaged for OpenSolaris.

Jaspersoft Integration with Openbravo. Tim Cloonan

JasperReports is the default report engine behind Openbravo ERP and POS projects.

Key ideas:

10.000 customers in 96 countries. 8 millions downloads, 90.000 members, 350 community projects, 50.000 forums support posts at jaspersoft.org
Report writing is a key part of Openbravo ERP customization
Using Jaspersoft iReport, the visual report designer, you can save time lots of time in the report creation process.

Business Momentum Integration. Ron Kramer

Business Momentum have created B-Orange, a solution that integrates Openbravo ERP, Alfresco, Zimbra, Funambol and Magento.

Key ideas:

B-Orange is a cooperation with Bonware, Advanced Projects and Products, Business Momentum.
Zimbra and Openbravo integration. Part of the e-mail integration is now part of Openbravo ERP since version 2.40
A demo of the integration was shown that is available on-line at wwww.businesssmomentum.eu

Qualian Technologies. Case Vaishnovi Infrastructure. Senthil Palanisamy

Implementing Openbravo ERP on a construction equipment company in India.

Key ideas:

Customer has 1.000 employees, 1 billion Indian ruppies turn over. Challenges: 100 desktops, independent systems for inventory and accounting, migration from a previous system. Need for new requirements not supported by their legacy system: centralized stock managed, BOM, sales commissions, etc.
The implementation has been very successful. Users and managers are happy because the new level of flexibility and functionality gained

Open Sistemas. Bocatta case. Andreu Bartolí (on behalf of Open Sistemas)

Implementing Openbravo POS in Bocatta, one of the largest fast food chain in Spain.

Key ideas:

Challenge: have all the different locations linked and integrated in a single system with a powerful POS system
Openbravo POS was further develop to accommodate better the fast food restaurant that was contributed back to Openbravo POS project.

Bonware. CaravanTukku case. Ville Lindfors

Implementing Openbravo ERP in a caravan accessory customer.

Key ideas:

Challenge: to automate sales, supply chain, invoicing, 200 customers, 2.000 stores doing international trade
Benefits: reduced labour costs, post costs (40.000 euros per year), ware activities are streamline
Plans to roll the same solution in the same industry and to enhance even further the customer business process

Participating in the Swiss Open Source Software Conference

2009-03-30T09:29:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-28T06:21:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-25T10:11:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-24T11:22:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-20T10:20:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-18T12:08:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-09T13:16:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-02T00:09:00.000-08:00

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

Openbravo ERP Modularity videos available

2009-02-26T02:28:00.000-08:00

Modularity is the most important feature debuting in Openbravo ERP R2.50. As a result of the modularity improvements in 2.50, developers will notice the following:

Easier to contribute to Openbravo ERP by allowing distributed and decoupled development and maintenance of optional features.
A rich set of extensions for the Community to meet their unique business requirements without bloating the core product.
Shorter implementation cycles by enabling system integrators to develop micro-vertical templates.
Scalable business opportunity by creating modules once that can be easily reused in multiple implementations, or sold to others implementing Openbravo ERP.

As part of the modularity program that we offered during the 2.50 alpha process, we created some videos to explain the main modularity concepts and workflows to the participants. We have just edited and published the videos in Openbravo Wiki.

The videos published are the following:

Course Introduction. A high level introduction of Openbravo modularity capabilities and benefits for users and developers.
Modularity Concepts‎. An introduction to the main Openbravo modularity concepts, including types of modules, the central repository and the module manager console.
Create a module. A description of the steps required to create, register, develop and publish a module.
Install a module‎. A step by step tutorial on how to install an Openbravo ERP module.
Update a module‎. A step by step tutorial on how to update an Openbravo ERP module.
Uninstall a module. A step by step tutorial on how to uninstall an Openbravo ERP module.

In case that you have little time, I strongly recommend you the modularity concepts videos that gives a good overview of Openbravo modularity from a developer's point of view.

If you have any questions regarding modularity please do not hesitate to post them in the Openbravo ERP developers forum.

Single Sign on launched for Openbravo Wiki and Openbravo Issues

2009-02-03T10:24:00.000-08:00

Openbravo actually runs Openbravo.com, Openbravo Issues, Openbravo Wiki, Openbravo Planet and other web properties to provide services to the Openbravo ecosystem. Nowadays, you have to log individually to every service, which requires authentication. For example, you have to login in Mantis and to our Wiki separately since they work as separated systems. You also may use different usernames and passwords. This situation is going to get more complex as we introduce more web services that require authentication for a full user experience.

To address this situation we have been working on a Single Sign-On solution based on CAS. This will allow users to have a single username and password for all Openbravo web site. More convenient yet, when you are authenticated in one Openbravo web sites you are automatically authenticated into the rest of other sites.

We are planning to enter into production of Single Sign-On in Openbravo web sites by 4th of February 20.00 GMT+1.

Users affected with this migration will be notified by email with any required step that they have to perform.

If you have any issue login into the systems, please let us know sending an email to migration@openbravo.com, specifying your name, the email you entered at the time of registration, the username that you usually employ, and the problem you are experiencing.

Thanks for your support!

Openbravo Community awards announced

2009-01-08T03:54:00.000-08:00

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.

The Individual Awards acknowledge people that have allocated time and resources to make Openbravo POS or ERP better projects and contain the categories; Best Quality Assurance, Best localizer, Best developer, Best support participant, in order to recognise contribution within these areas.

The Technology Awards recognize outstanding projects led by any company or organization built on top of Openbravo technology. In order to acknowledge contribution within these areas, the categories are; Best Localization, Best Implementation and Best Development.

The winners will be awarded during the Conference's World Community Day 2 - Sunday 19th April, 2009. An award certificate will be given to all the winners.

On 2nd March 2009 the Candidate nomination will open. Stay tuned for more details!

Packt Publishing is looking for an Openbravo ERP book author

2008-12-18T01:02:00.000-08:00

The book publisher Packt Publishing is looking for an individual or a group of people that can write a book in English about Openbravo ERP. Their idea is to produce an introductory book that covers the main aspects of Openbravo ERP functionality, installation, configuration and customization. This can be of great help to newcomers to the Openbravo ecosystem.

Packt Publishing specializes in Information Technology and has boasts a large collection of publications in the area of Open Source and open technologies. Its books have a practical approach and focus on sharing the experiences of your fellow IT professionals in adapting and customizing today's application.

If you are interested or you require further details please contact Packt Publishing.

Openbravo World Conference call for papers opens

2008-12-03T02:49:00.000-08:00

The Openbravo World Conference is an initiative put forth to share and fuel the growth of the professional open source space, namely in the Openbravo ERP technology. We will be welcoming to the community days (18th and 19th of April 2009) all those belonging to the Openbravo ecosystem: community member such as developers, customers, partners, and also newcomers. The access to the two community days will be free and will only require previous registration, which is now open. Make sure to reserve your place soon as space is limited.

As an open source project, Openbravo has always relied on contributions to increase its value, and this Conference is no different. That is why we strongly encourage interested parties in contributing to this event by presenting their expertise to an audience of 300 professionals involved in the field of open source ERPs.

The call for papers is now open until January 31st, 2009. This is a great opportunity to share your vision and experience relating to the following topics with the Openbravo community:

* Openbravo projects’ future direction
* How to extend Openbravo project functionality
* How to boost collaborations and contributions within the Openbravo ecosystem
* Migration from closed source ERP into Openbravo
* Experiences in the area of localization
* Integration with third party software
* Best practices around Openbravo ERP and POS
* Unusual deployments of Openbravo ERP and POS

Presentations can either be 30-minute sessions (Q&A included) or can have a round table format. As you know, all of these are very important issues for the Openbravo community. We invite everybody to participate by sending us your ideas using the call-for-papers-form.

The proposal selection criteria will be the following:

* Adequate for the conference audience
* Focussing on Openbravo products
* Professionally written and presented
* Providing value to the attendees

We recommend to keep these in mind when preparing your proposals. Do not hesitate to contact me (jmas at openbravo.com) if you have any questions or suggestions.

We will also have a session dedicated to Openbravo Success Stories, so if you currently use or have implemented Openbravo ERP or POS, we want to hear from you!

For further details such as the Agenda and Keynote Speakers, please consult the Openbravo World Conference microsite.

New category classifications for the Openbravo Wiki

2008-12-02T04:32:00.000-08:00

Since its launch, the Openbravo Wiki has been growing steadily. In the last six months the documents published went from 600 to 1040 (as of today). Openbravo Wiki has more than 22.000 unique visitors and 200.000 page views per month. It has become the place of reference for Openbravo documentation sharing, development status and processes.

As a result of this growth, we need to review our categorization policy. Some of the categories contain over 200 articles, which makes it hard to use. When the Wiki was launched, Openbravo POS was not part of Openbravo's portfolio and was never accommodated properly in the Wiki categorization. Additionally, the number of translated documents has also been growing significantly, requiring a new taxonomy to allow them to be on par with those in the English language.

For all these reasons, we have put together a new taxonomy proposa l for Openbravo Wiki which aims to fix all these problems. We will move from a flat category structure to a taxonomy with subcategories, and more importantly, the new taxonomy will set the foundation for keeping our Wiki growing while efficiently classifying our content for our users' benefit. We are going to recategorize more than 1.000 documents to accommodate the new category system.

Please let us know if you have comments on the new category proposal, whether you would like to see new categories, or any other suggestion that you may have.

Meritocracy levels in Openbravo ERP and POS projects

2008-11-14T01:53:00.000-08:00

In the Openbravo Manifesto that we published in April this year, Openbravo as company leading Openbravo ERP and POS projects committed to a few principles, including meritocracy. Quoting the manifest:

We believe we should gain people's respect and recognition due to our work. We shall always make sure that everybody has access to our open resources on an equal basis and we will accept contributors based on the merit of their work and their skills.

Today we present our meritocracy policy that has the objective of building a meritocracy access system based on community members' reputation. The levels are based on people's technical abilities, skills and shown responsibility. The role names are built on the name of the (b) mark, which we pronounce "obi" (as in letter "o" and letter "b"). On top of providing more responsibility and rights to different services, these levels would be highly visibly and an important indicator of the contributor's reputation within the Openbravo ERP and POS communities.

In the future, these levels will be precomputed automatically from the different Openbravo collaboration sites. Until, this is done, we do maintain the list manually, if you think that you are entitled to be listed please do not hesitate to contact me (jmas at openbravo.com)

Help us to get better participating in the Community Hurdle Assessment

2008-11-03T06:46:00.000-08:00

We have started an initiative to identify the main barriers that people face when joining the Openbravo community and to spot areas of enhancement that can increase Openbravo ERP success.

If you are new to the Openbravo community and you are interested in helping us please check the Community Hurdle Assessment page that contains all the details. Contributing to this initiative you can make Openbravo ERP community an easier place to work with and reduce the entrance barrier of future contributors.

Please, feel free to contact me directly at jmas at openbravo.com if you have any doubt or your are interested in participating. Openbravo will also give a 150 euro Amazon gift certificate to the participants that complete the assessment.

Openbravo ERP community and academia institutions

2008-09-29T02:34:00.000-07:00

Universities have played a very significant role in the development of the Internet and open source. Some of the basic technologies in the open source space, such as the BSD based operating systems, the X-Window graphical system and many others, have been developed and improved in universities. Openbravo ERP is an open community which strives to maximize collaboration and welcomes contributions from the academia world.

At Openbravo, we have crafted a program aimed to help academia institutions to embrace the teaching and contribution to Openbravo ERP. We think that this program can help students to develop their domain of knowledge in the ERP space, gain experience in contributing within open source communities, experience in distributed software development, and in the use of tools used in business environments. In the other side, we expect them to to produce deliverables that are usable in the Openbravo ERP project.

If you are responsible for a program in an academic institution and you have interest in participating in this program, please contact us at collaborate_AT_openbravo.com. Openbravo offers a framework agreement for academia institutions willing to participate.

More information at Openbravo Wiki.

New Openbravo ERP and POS forums to discuss how to contribute

2008-09-26T08:37:00.000-07:00

A few days back Carlos Romero was talking about how contributing to Openbravo projects is a win - win proposition. A clear example of this is how the 21 localizations projects that have produced deliverables are benefiting the whole community. In our Contributor's guides for Openbravo ERP and for POS there are more examples of areas where people are actually contributing.

We regularly receive requests asking how people can help Openbravo projects, how they can coordinate with the quality assurance or development teams, how they add a new feature, etc. To easy these conversations we have opened two new forums: Contributing to Openbravo ERP and Contributing to Openbravo POS. The objective of these forums is to provide a place were people can discuss these ideas publically and have more visibility on how they can contribute to Openbravo projects.

Do not hesitate to visit the forums if you have any question or suggestion regarding how to contribute.

Openbravo ERP Java libraries updated

2008-09-24T06:49:00.000-07:00

I have been working on the past weeks on the library auditing project. Yesterday all changes were merged into trunk.

As part of the project, I have removed some duplicated libraries that we had in the project, reducing the final size of openbravo.war from 96MB to 46MB. I also also updated the rest of the libraries, as result now we are using JasperReports 3.0, something requested for a long time, and also the latest versions of the database access drivers. David Baz is also working on updating the Dojo Javascript library to the latest version too.

All of these enhancements are going to be part for Openbravo ERP 2.50. If you find any issue with the updated libraries, just let me know (jmas at openbravo.com).

Openbravo World Conference April 17-19, 2009 in Barcelona

2008-09-09T01:01:00.000-07:00

The Openbravo World Conference's is an initiative put forth to share and fuel the growth of the professional open source space, namely in the Openbravo ERP technology. It distinguishes itself from its predecessors by putting a strong effort on third party contributions, such as from other open source projects, through a call-for-papers process, therefore covering a larger scope of Openbravo Community's interests. We will be welcoming to the community days (18th and 19th) all those belonging to the Openbravo ecosystem: developers, consultants, users, companies, partners, and newcomers. The access to the two community days will be free and will only require previous registration (registration will open in December 2008). Also, there will be a day reserved for Openbravo partners on Friday April 17th.

Throughout Openbravo’s World Conference, you will be able to meet with the main Openbravo developers and leaders, learn about our plans for the future, share and listen to Openbravo success cases as well as how to make business and complete successful implementations. We are building a program for the largest gathering of Openbravo ERP & POS developers, users and partners that will reflect Openbravo projects’ wide-ranging appeal and capabilities. The goal of the conference is to provide an open forum for ERP professionals and enthusiasts to explore and create the best solutions, getting first hand information from key Openbravo developers and other field experts.

The call for papers for the community days will open to everyone on the 1st of December of 2008. We will publishing a list of topics that we consider hot for this year and also the papers acceptance criteria.

We will keep you posted, namely through the event micro-site which will be launched in the fall. Please, do not hesitate to contact me (jmas at openbravo.com) if you have any questions or suggestions.

Why Open source is good according to Google

2008-09-02T07:11:00.000-07:00

Today the Internet is thrilled by the imminent launch of a new web browser from Google called Chrome. More details will follow during today but it looks like is going bring more innovation to the web browser space, something like another open source product called Firefox already did in the usability and extensibility area.

A comic from Scott McCloud illustrates the motivations behind Google Chrome and explains why going open source for this product was the right decision from a Google perspective.
Reproduced under a Creative Commons license

Google focuses on why open source is good from a product perspective, mainly because it boosts collaborative efforts and helps to drive innovation.

At Openbravo we think the same. That is the reason why we sponsor a large part of the development of Openbravo POS and ERP and the infrastructure that makes them possible. We are also looking forward to introduce Openbravo ERP R2.50 which will bring a stronger product modularity, something that will be key to allowing to build an ecosystem of solutions around OpenbravoERP.

A new Openbravo Wiki main page rolls out

2008-07-28T08:05:00.000-07:00

After a few weeks of work we are very excited to present our new homepage for the Openbravo Wiki.

One of the objectives of the new design was to give its own entity and weight to the Openbravo POS project. This project joined the Openbravo family when the Wiki was already working. In the recent months, Openbravo POS documentation has been growing and required a more nicer fit. Now, when you enter the main page you have two tabs that allow you to switch the content for both projects.

Openbravo Wiki is currently the main entrance to our community with currently 20.715 unique visitors (July 2008) and experiencing a steady monthly grow of 10%. We wanted to give more visibility to other news that happen around the project every week like the blogging and the Subversion activity.

We have a new 'Editorial content' area that will help us to highlight these important issues that have occurred around the project. On the bottom of the page, you have the new collaboration area where you have the fundamental links for these interested in start contributing to the project.

Gil Forcada has been also working on enhancing our documentation for the Wiki and establishing guidelines for the style and the content. Very soon he will be sharing with us some examples of how we can do better documents in the Wiki.

If you have suggestions for improvement let us know.

News from the Openbravo ERP localization front

2008-07-21T10:56:00.000-07:00

In the last days many things regarding Openbravo ERP localization have occurred that we would like to share with you:

Openbravo ERP R2.40 beta was released last week. The estimated effort of updating the translations from Openbravo ERP R2.3x to Openbravo ERP 2.40 is 5.000 words. This is a two days work effort of a full time translation. Rafa Roda, from Openbravo S.L, has already updated the Spanish localization to version 2.40. Starting from Openbravo R2.40 the only language pack that is included by default in Openbravo ERP is English. Spanish language, can be downloaded from SourceForge and installed like the rest of the additional languages.
Phil Heenan has been working on Openbravo2PO as part of a more ambitious plan of enhancing the whole translation process for Openbravo ERP. Phil has already asked for feedback on his enhancements for the process. As result of his work, Openbravo2PO is now the tool that we recommend for translating Openbravo ERP and PO the recommended format. Openbravo2PO has been already used successfully in the German, Italian and Spanish translation efforts.
Eduardo Argal (ear at openbravo dot com) is the new localization coordinator at Openbravo replacing me in this role. He is part of the localization Openbravo team and has a great experience in accounting and localization. If you have any questions regarding localization we recommend to use Openbravo ERP localization forum.
Kenzo Repole, the localizer for Saudia Arabia, has been working on adding RTL (right-to-left) support for Openbravo. This will be part of Openbravo ERP R2.50. If you are interested in helping us in enhancing RTL support please contact Eduardo Argal (ear at openbravo dot com).

That's all for now.

Openbravo POS packages for OpenSuse and Fedora

2008-06-25T05:44:00.000-07:00

Using the wonderful Opensuse build service I have built a set of packages for OpenSuse and Fedora. You can download them from:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/openbravo/

The packages for Fedora should work well under CentOS and Red Hat. You have the source code of the packages available and also a bug report with some know issues.

Please, let me know if you have any issue installing these packages.

Notice that these provided as they are. Use at your own risk.

Fourth community chat meeting on 18th of June at 14.00 GMT: the roadmap discussion

2008-06-13T03:21:00.000-07:00

As many of you already know, we are having bimonthly community chat meetings.

The sole objective is this chat meeting is to discuss with you our planed roadmap. Some of the discussion already has started in our forums following Paolo's call for your feedback.

If you are planning to develop a module or feature for Openbravo this is a good opportunity also to synchronize efforts.

Here you have all the information for the fourth meeting:

Date: 18th of June at 14.00 GMT
Where: IRC Network FreeNode at the #openbravo channel
Language: English

Please, if you are planning to attend it is important that you add your name to the chat meeting web page. If you are not familiar with the chats, we have a Wiki page that explains how to setup the software and get connected.

Openbravo community survey results

2008-06-05T01:45:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the many people that participated on the first Openbravo community survey.

I would like to share with you some of the main conclusions:

· 50.77% of respondents work for micro SME companies
· 47,69% of respondents are people related to information technology or software developers
· 52.31% of respondents have have less than 1 year of experience using ERPs
· 33.85% of respondents never worked in an open source community before
· The main areas of planned contributions of the respondents are participating in the forums and doing localizations
· 81.54% of of respondents use PostgreSQL

These results helps us to better understand the background and objectives of our community members.

Regarding Openbravo ERP product feedback, we got the following results (been 5 the maximum):

· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's extensibility capabilities? 3,2 (Absolute deviation 0,82)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's customisation capabilities? 3,35 (Absolute deviation 0,96)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's installation? 3,31(Absolute deviation 0,98)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's functionality? 3,55 (Absolute deviation 0,67)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's documentation? 2,5 (Absolute deviation 1,04)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's quality? 3,45 (Absolute deviation 0,81)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's performance? 3,16 (Absolute deviation 0,81)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's ease of use? 3,29 (Absolute deviation 1,00)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's ease of contributing? 3,17 (Absolute deviation 0,86)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's business value? 3,73 (Absolute deviation 0,73)
· How do you rate your overall satisfaction with Openbravo ERP's? 3,56 (Absolute deviation 0,8)

I would like to comment on some of these results:

· Installation used to be a major area of complaints for Openbravo ERP due to the number of components that are part of his stack and are needed to run the application. The installation process was enhanced when we licensed BitRock technology for Openbravo installers. We created also more documentation for the installation process, that many people helped us to enhance. The use of virtual images for evaluation also helped to easy the evaluation process. With Openbravo 2.40 we have fixed many small issues with the installer, that should help to rise the user's level of satisfaction.

· We know that documentation is a weak point of the product. Openbravo has been lately working a lot on this area and the community has played an important role. We have recently opened a full time position to put our documentation in good shape.

· We are very happy with the product quality results of the survey. There is no doubt that this has been one of the major areas of improvement during last year. Much better processes in place, the acceptance test or the opening of the Quality Assurance to our community. We are already in the process to deploy a more powerful bug tracking system that will allow us have a better control on Quality Assurance issues. We invite you to participate in the Quality Assurance efforts and assure that the bugs that are critical for you get fixed.

· Regarding extensibility capabilities that is going to be one of the major areas of improvements for Openbravo 2.50, specially on terms of plugins, verticals and its packing. We will shortly be sharing our plans regarding this.

· Regarding easy of contributing is something that we have still to work hard. We have the contributor's guide and some good process in place and a Forge collaboration platform coming in the next months, but still there are many things to do.

That's all for now. If you have any comments or suggestion please comment on!

3 days left to participate in the Community Survey

2008-05-28T10:17:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, we launched our first Community Survey to better understand the background and objectives of our Community Members. We would really appreciate it if you could spend a couple of minutes filling the survey and giving us, in an anonymous format, some data points on your interests in the Openbravo projects.

The information collected is going to help us to prioritize our community activities, infrastructure investments and other aspects.

Go to http://openbravo.questionform.com/public/Openbravo-Community-Event-Survey and make your opinion count!

Thanks a lot for your help!

Openbravo Get Together June 21st and 22nd in Miami, United States

2008-05-26T09:09:00.000-07:00

During June 21st and 22nd we will be holding the Openbravo Get Together in Miami, United States. The agenda is already available. There is a business day where you will get the insights of how to do business with Openbravo products and a technology day focus on Openbravo technology, product's roadmaps, localization and community services. The language of the event is English.

This is a great opportunity to learn about Openbravo products, do peer-to-peer networking and to share experiences with other Openbravo user's and developers. The Openbravo Get Together's are free and open to everyone, you only have to register. During this Get Together Brian Reale from Colosa Inc. will be visiting us and presenting the benefits of Colosa's open source workflow products and how they can add more value to Openbravo ERP implementations.

We are looking forward to meet you in Miami. If you have any suggestion or comment for this event please let us know.

Sharing Openbravo Code Snippets

2008-04-18T03:08:00.000-07:00

Openbravo Community contributor Victor Gaspar published a few days back a message where he shared with the community how he has managed to customize Openbravo ERP for some of his specific needs. For some time now, we wanted to have a code snippets section in our Wiki. Code snippets are small pieces of reusable code, like small cooking recipes.

We have created a category in the Openbravo Wiki called Code Snippets to hold documents that contain these pieces of reusable code. If you have small samples of how to customize Openbravo, small changes to the code that you think that may be useful to other people, please create a new page on the Openbravo Wiki and add it to this new category. You can also use the template CodeSnippets, like it is done in the already existent documents, to provide information of your snippets in a structured way.

You can check Victor's snippets CustomRemittance, AddFieldWebService and PrintButton. If you need any help or assistance on this, please do not hesitate to write to the developer's forum.

Openbravo Manifesto

2008-04-16T03:21:00.000-07:00

Last weekend during the Openbravo Get Together in Barcelona we presented the Openbravo Manifesto (which was published both in English and Spanish). For a long time, many of us at Openbravo S.L wanted to clarify the extent of our commitment to Openbravo ERP and POS projects, and open source in general; we also wanted to share our values and belief with our Community. Openbravo was born as an open source project and some of its values are deeply rooted in the company.

The manifesto highlights Openbravo's company values: transparency, openness, collaboration, meritocracy, leadership, excellence and gratitude. We strive to live and keep these values in mind in everything that we do.

Most importantly, the Manifesto also highlights Openbravo company's commitments towards our Community: open source availability, open access to the code under development, open documentation and effective project infrastructure. We are also committed to honor other people's rights by providing proper attribution to any contribution and respecting other people's intellectual property; at the same time, we are ready to defend our Community's investment into the project through legal means if necessary.

We believe that publishing this Manisfesto is very important step ahead, since Openbravo S.L is currently the main sponsor of Openbravo projects. Additionally, we are proud of being the first company of our category that makes a public statement about its commitments to his Community. This underscores our belief that, from the very first day, our Community has been and will continue to be the key to success for the Openbravo projects.

More help on the community front

2008-04-09T01:27:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone. I just want to ask you to give a warm welcome to Gil Forcada. He has joined the community departament at Openbravo. He will help doing Wiki editing tasks, answering forums questions, doing administrative tasks and collecting our community statistics. Gil speaks English, Spanish and Catalan.

Gil has been a contributor to the GNOME project for a few years, helping on the Catalan localization effort and helping on organizing GUADEC, the GNOME community annual European meeting. On top of that, Gil has been a founder and very active member of guifi, an open and free wireless network focus on Catalonia with more than 4.000 access points. All the infrastructure has been based on Linux and other open source solutions.

If you attend to our next Get Together in Barcelona this weekend, you will have the opportunity to meet him personally.

Third chat community meeting summary

2008-04-02T08:43:00.000-07:00

Today, 2nd of April 14.00 GMT, we had our third community chat meeting at Openbravo to coordinate our efforts and to comment on new developments. We also discussed the topics that people added to the public agenda. We were around 35 participants and we talked for two hours. There is a full log available. You can use the Open Discussion forum or the appropriated forum for your topic if you want to comment something on what has been discussed or you still have a question that we could not answer at the time.

Some highlights from the meeting

Paolo Juvara explained what is the current status of the Openbravo ERP 2.40, building on his previous public comments, and highlighted some of the most significant features Openbravo Core:

Keyboard operation: his project not only provides shortcuts for all the functions in the system and allows its mouse-less operations; it also allows you to configure the default first field where the focus is placed when you navigate to a new record. We believe this will significantly reduce the number of clicks required to perform data entry.
UI feedback: this project will provide visual clues to the state of the system (record in edit mode, record in read only mode, processing, loading data, etc.).
Requisitions: this project significantly improves the Procurement footprint of Openbravo and enables enterprises to automate the buying process,from expression of demand to PO authoring. The Procurement flow is further improved with another small project that allows to simplify the receiving process by allow people to receive by PO number.
Multi-schema accounting: this capability allows you to account a single transaction multiple times, according to different account schemas.

In practice, this enables operating multi-national organizations with Openbravo where different organizations need to report to the local legal authorities plus the parent company.

Adrian Romero also commented on the future plans for Openbravo POS that are already on our roadmap, including, a new customer module with costumer and warehouse integration, support for skins and enhancements in the localization area.

We aim to schedule the next chat during May 2008. We will keep you posted.

Third community chat meeting on 2nd of April at 14.00 GMT

2008-03-28T07:31:00.000-07:00

As many of you already know, we are having bimonthly community meetings. The objective is to discuss the topics that you consider important related to Openbravo ERP and Openbravo POS product and community processes.

Here you have all the information for the second meeting:

Date: 2nd of April at 14.00 GMT
Where: IRC Network FreeNode at the #openbravo channel
Language: English

Please, if you are planning to attend it is important that you add your name to the chat meeting web page and also that you add any topic in the agenda would like to discuss. If you are not familiar with the chats, we have a Wiki page that explains how to setup the software and get connected.

Openbravo Conference and Get Together meetings during 2008

2008-03-17T06:48:00.000-07:00

Last year we had the Openbravo Get Together. It was a great event with many people attending all over the world and, as a result, we have decided to increase the number of events we do with our community.

This year the main community meeting is called Openbravo Conference. This event aims to be the global event for the Openbravo Community. We are planning to organize a call for papers and enable sponsorship opportunities. Also we plan to open it more to products and technologies that we interoperate with and solutions built on top of Openbravo products. Openbravo Conference would be in Barcelona, Spain again and it would be during November 2008. We will be publishing the details before the summer.

Additionally, during 2008 we are going to have three shorter local community meetings. Two of them are already defined:

· 12th and 13rd of April 2008 in Barcelona, Spain in NH Master hotel.
· 21st and 22nd of June 2008 in Miami, United States.
· A third location to be determined before the end of the year.

The Openbravo Get Together's are free and open to everyone, you only have to register. These events will take place over the weekend and will be dedicated to get in touch with our local communities. We will have a more specific agenda during next days. We are calling these meetings Openbravo Get Together's because they would be a bit more informal and also shorter (two mornings) that the Openbravo Conference.

If you have any suggestion for these events or comment please let me know.

Openbravo community plans for 2008

2008-02-20T09:24:00.000-08:00

Year 2007 has been a tremendous year for Openbravo. During this year we focused our community efforts on adopting the best processes and methodologies for Openbravo ERP development.

Our communication and transparency has been greatly enhanced including: publishing and updating our roadmaps, setting up IRC channels and having regular chat meetings, start using mailing lists or the blogging and Planet efforts. Another accomplishment has been in the documentation area. Openbravo ERP started as a home grown solution for enterprises and its documentation was modest. Openbravo community have been working hard on extending the Openbravo documentation. Still many efforts are necessary but a good progression is made every week.

During year 2008 we plan to focus on providing a better infrastructure for people developing Openbravo ERP and POS, and also, for people working on Openbravo related projects, like plugins, verticals or localizations.

Let me give you some highlights of our planned services:

A better Wiki. Building on top of our Wiki we plan to add more exciting functionality: enable users to rate articles, activate the discussion pages to allow people to comment on already existing articles, a better category system, better integration with other Openbravo news sources using RSS.
New forums. This is has been a long request from our community: to have a better and more powerful forum system.
New bug tracking system. Our current bug tracking system at SourceForge has many limitations. We have been evaluating different solutions we would make a decision soon.
Single sign for all the community services enabling users to authenticate once and gain access to the resources of multiple community systems.
Openbravo Forge. Starting with Openbravo ERP R2.4x series, to be released in June 2008, it would be more easy to develop and deploy plugins, verticals and extensions. The objective of Openbravo Forge is to provide hosting services for projects of Openbravo contributors and to boost collaboration between the different efforts. Services like forums, source control, bug tracking, news publishing or file downloads would be provided.

This is the direction that we are working and we hope that it would happen during 2008. We are focusing first on the new bug tracking system and Wiki and then in the rest of the services. We ask you please to be patient. Any feedback on these plans this is really appreciated.

Anyone willing to provide additional services or resources to help to build our community is more than welcome.

Openbravo community highlights 25th of January

2008-01-25T03:43:00.000-08:00

Hello everybody,

There are some news that happened during the past weeks:

A new forum has been opened for the Openbravo community in Brazil. Many ideas have started to flow already and they have already started to work on translating the little setup guide to Brazilian Portuguese.
We have updated the virtual appliances to Openbravo ERP 2.35 MP1. As usual they are available for Xen and VMWare and there are instructions in the Openbravo Wiki that explain how to use them.
Asier Zabaleta has put together some documentation on how to quickly hack an Openbravo skin to change its default colors.
We have created a new mailing list called openbravo-commits. Every commit to the openbravo Subversion repository generates an email showing who made the change, when they made it, what files and directories changed, and how they changed. Aside from the obvious technical benefits of peer review, very common in open source projects, commit emails help create a sense of community, because they establish a shared environment in which people can react to events (commits) that they know are visible to others as well.
There is a also a new list called openbravo-development, that is a general development mailing list.

That's all for now. If you have any news regarding Openbravo success or efforts, please let me know (jmas at openbravo.com)

Second chat community meeting summary

2008-01-22T08:05:00.000-08:00

Today, 22nd of January 14.00 GMT, we had our second community chat meeting at Openbravo to coordinate our efforts and to comment on new developments. We also discussed the topics that people added to the public agenda. We were around 25 participants and we talked for two hours. There is a full log available. You can use the Open Discussion forum or the appropriated forum for your topic if you want to comment something on what has been discussed or you still have a question that we could not answer at the time.

Some highlights from the meeting:

· We comment on our test3 for localized chart of accounts that has been published recently. Previously published tests 1 and 2 verify that the initial client setup can be done correctly and test 3 verifies that balanced sheet is properly balanced.

· Regarding BI (business intelligence) . Openbravo ERP R2.40 does not include a BPM engine but we have an active project for BI. We are still not 100% positive that we will be able to make it in time and if not we would like to descope the feature but keep the schedule. In any case, we are very optimistic about BI. For BPM, we hope to make it in the next release 2.50, but as you know, we publish a road map for one release at a time, so no commitments.

· Openbravo POS. Version 2.0 is scheduled for mid February. There is a description of the bug fixes and new functionality available in the public roadmap. Currently Openbravo POS supports payment using magnetic cards but at this point there is no support for smart cards and payment gateways functionality has to be extended.

· Ricardo from Portugal was asking for SAT support in Openbravo ERP. There is already a message in the forums dicussing the issue and we have agreed to keep the discussion there.

We aim to schedule the next chat during March 2008. Our current tentative date is 18th of March 14.00 GMT. We will keep you posted.

Second community chat meeting on 22nd of January at 14.00 GMT

2008-01-14T09:16:00.000-08:00

After our first community chat meeting we are planning to have bimonthly community meetings. The objective is to keep the discussion going on new Openbravo ERP developments and discuss the topics that you consider important related to Openbravo ERP and Openbravo POS product and community processes.

Here you have all the information for the second meeting:

Date: 22nd of January at 14.00 GMT
Where: IRC Network FreeNode at the #openbravo channel
Language: English

Please, if you are planning to attend it is important that you add your name to the chat meeting web page and also that you add any topic in the agenda would like to discuss.

Openbravo and eZ Publish interoperability

2007-12-21T06:56:00.000-08:00

Jordi Massaguer Pla has just published the connector that allows Openbravo ERP and eZ Publish to interoperate.

To integrate Openbravo with an e-commerce solution has been a common request from our community that can now be accomplish using eZ Publish.

In the eZforOb project page you have the file for download and all the technical details and instructions explaining how to install the solution. The integration is done using Openbravo web services.

The work has been done by Opentrends that kindly have make the effort to polishing the integration and publishing it. This work is publish as "it is".

Update: Jordi has published some documentation about this integration.

Openbravo stable versions policy

2007-12-17T01:27:00.000-08:00

As you probably know a few weeks back we published our release policy. We now have a Community Edition that intends providing the community with a stable version of the product. The most recent Community Edition is Openbravo ERP R2.35 and a new Community Edition release is planned every six months. Defects can be reported against this edition but no guarantee is offered on when they will be fixed. Bug fixes are only distributed as part of subsequent Community Edition and back ported to an existing Community Edition at Openbravo's discretion.

Quality is a very important issue for us and our community members have often shown that is important to them also. Starting with Openbravo R2.3 series, we have an acceptance test that defines what tests a community edition must pass to be considered production quality. Our Quality Assurance process is open to everyone that wishes to participate and help us to make sure that the production releases is indeed stable enough for production purposes.

We are fully aware that no matter how much effort we put in the QA process, users implementing Openbravo in demanding situations will always be likely to find issues. Openbravo is committed to continuously fix issues even after the release of the product and always publishes those fixes to the community in source format in the development trunk. Users can extract them from there and apply them individually to their environments or wait for the next release to consume them in packaged form.

In addition to that, Openbravo - whenever it believes it is needed - will now go one extra step and packages fixes of the most severe issues affecting our community in the form of Maintenance Packs, which are fully tested before release according to the community process, and distributed both in source and binary format.

As an exemple, we now know that a maintenance pack is needed for 2.35 and next week we are starting the Quality Assurance for Openbravo 2.35 Maintenance Pack 1 that aims at correcting the most critical issues detected in R2.35 by our community. We are going to tag the Subversion repository to indicate exactly which source code has been used to produce the binaries for maintenance pack 1. We will provide very shortly details on the time frame to be able to participate in the QA process of this maintenance pack.

We are not going to do a stable branch version. Instead of investing time in back-porting and forward-porting fixes between different branches we are going to focus on making sure that our community stable version has a good quality when it is released and we will focus our investment on developing on trunk. Additionally, we want to encourage that all bug fixes are committed to trunk. If someone wants to apply a bug fix from trunk to the latest stable version can easily doing extracting the fix (revision) from Subversion and applying to its own installation.

Openbravo is going to lunch a subscription service that will offer updates and support during a life cycle of few years.

Openbravo community highlights 4th of December

2007-12-04T03:11:00.000-08:00

Hello everybody,

There are some news that happened during the past weeks:

Answering to the request of some community members we have published the instructions and data files that allow to build the installers for Openbravo.
Adrián Romero has documented how the new database source management works in Openbravo R2.35 and later versions. As you know, this is an important step that makes possible to properly do version control on the database sources and also simplifies the process of leveraging fixes and code from different versions of Openbravo.
We have recently published two documents that explain how to install and setup and develop for Openbravo using Eclipse IDE.
We have to define the specifications for some of the major functionality that will be included in Openbravo R2.40 including Tags, Intrusive alerts or industry templates. Feel free to comment on any of this using the Openbravo open discussion forum.
As you Openbravo has acquired the LibrePOS. We have created a section in our Wiki that collects all the documentation available for Openbravo POS (previously known as LibrePOS). Martin Alvidrez has also completed a new Openbravo POS User Manual in Spanish.

That's all for now. If you have any news regarding Openbravo success or efforts, please let me know (jmas at openbravo.com)

First chat community meeting done!

2007-11-29T04:05:00.000-08:00

Last Tuesday, 27th of November 14.00 GMT, we had our first community chat meeting at Openbravo to coordinate our efforts and to comment on new developments. We also discussed the topics that people added to the public agenda. We were around 30 participants and we talked for two hours. There is a full log available. You can use the Open Discussion forum if you want to comment something on what has been discussed.

We really appreciate your participation and feedback. As action points for Openbravo before the next chat I have:

Localization/Accounting: Publish the 3rd test of our chart of accounts quality assurance process. Tests 1 and 2 (already available) verify that the initial client setup can be done correctly and the new one will verify that balanced sheet is properly balanced.
Localization/Translations: Publish a new set of tools to transform from Openbravo XML to Openbravo. Jens Wike wrote some tools and we are in the process of publishing them.
Development: Create a public development announcement mailing list to inform of important changes from a development point of view

We aim to schedule the next chat during December. We probably will do it between the 17th and 21th of December when people is not yet in their Xmas break. We will keep you posted.

First community chat meeting on 27th of November 14.00 GMT

2007-11-21T01:44:00.000-08:00

During the last months several people expressed the need of doing regular meetings to discuss the development of Openbravo ERP project. During the Openbravo Get Together last month we had lots of very constructive discussions around Openbravo ERP. To keep the discussion going we are going to hold a monthly community chat meeting where the new developments will be commented and also we will discuss the topics that you consider important.

Here you have all the information for the first meeting:

Date: 27th of November at 14.00 GMT
Where: IRC Network FreeNode at the #openbravo channel
Language: English

Please, if you are planing to attend it is important that you add your name to the chat meeting web page and also that you add any topic in the agenda would like to discuss.

New Subversion server for Openbravo project

2007-11-13T06:28:00.000-08:00

For the last 18 months Openbravo project has been using the Subversion service offered by Sourceforge to maintain the source code repository. Starting on November 2007, we start to use a Subversion server fully managed by us, and mirroring this repository to the Sourceforge server.

Having our own server allows us to offer better services to our community of developers that we can't do through standard Sourceforge services since some of the capabilities of subversion are partially truncated: like creating new repositories, private branches or better control in terms of server administration.

We plan to do is to create a branch for each developer in our community where they will be able to develop new functionalities. All the community-provided functionalities could be later be include as core functionalities of Openbravo or be packaged as plug-ins.

Openbravo will keep the Sourceforge subversion repository alive and synchronized using svk (as a read-only repository). This synchronization allows us to achieve three objectives:

1) Save bandwidth since most SVN access is in read only mode.
2) Preserve our activity ranking on SourceForge. Openbravo is still a very young project and we have been receiving a lot of attention from being one of the top projects in SourceForge; this has benefited both us and the community and it is very important for us to continue to be part of SourceForge.
3) Have a backup server in case the main Subversion server is down.

We have a document the explains how to access the new Subversion server. Also there is a new web based interface that allow browsing the repository and also subscribe to the changes using a RSS feed reader. If you are working on localization note that we have create a separate repository to store all the localizations.

Please, if you have any question or you need access to the Subversion repository you can contact me (jmas at openbravo.com).

Chart of accounts news and documentation

2007-11-09T02:12:00.000-08:00

As we explained in Localization Round Table at Openbravo Get Together in Barcelona, Openbravo has been working hard on enhancing the chart of accounts support and its processes in the Openbravo ERP R2.3x release series.

We have been working with a consultancy company to identify which areas of Openbravo ERP could be enhanced, which documentation needed to be created, and finally, to produce a verified chart of accounts for United States.

Let me summarize the main results of these efforts:

What is new in Openbravo ERP R2.3x (regarding chart of accounts):

· The number of default accounts was reduced to 30, cleaning all the accounts that were defined but not used and verifying that the accounts left were used properly in the different parts of the application.

· Operands. Starting with Openbravo R2.35 it is no longer necessary to define the operands for accounts in the application. They can be defined in the chart of accounts directly. In R2.35 the operands of operators should be defined before using the operand. In the next version, it would be possible to use them in any place.

· The Initial Client Setup process has been revised making it more robust. It has been divided in different phases and it generates a very detailed report when importing the chart of accounts. This report helps to detect potential errors in the chart of accounts.

Chart of accounts

· The Chart of Accounts for United States has been simplified. It went from 300 to 100 accounts and it now builds correctly the balance sheet and the account of results. This is the chart of accounts that we recommend as example for people building chart of accounts in countries with similar account systems to United States, like Venezuela.

· The chart of accounts for Spain has also been enhanced to include the operands needed and to avoid having to define them in the application.

Testing the chart of accounts

We have created a testing process for Chart of Accounts that verifies that the chart of account is correct and that it builds the balance sheet correctly. We are encouraging all localizers to perform these tests in their chart of accounts.

Also we have been working on extending the documentation for the Chart of Accounts including a full description of all the accounts.

New chart of accounts for Openbravo R2.35

Starting with Openbravo R2.35, all the chart of accounts published at SourceForge are guaranteed to have passed the tests 1 and 2 in of our chart of accounts testing procedure. Right now, we have published the verified chart of accounts for United States, South Africa and Romania. We are working working with many contributors to verify and update the rest of chart of accounts.

We hope that all of these changes will easy the process of localizing Openbravo ERP to the different account systems. If you have questions, suggestions or doubts do not hesitate to use our Translations & Localizations forum.

Openbravo Get Together - highlights from 2nd day

2007-10-29T01:30:00.000-07:00

Today was the second day of the Openbravo Get Together meeting. A full day dedicated to Openbravo product and technology. We were around 60 people during day.

Here a summary and links of today's main sessions:

· Openbravo: recent achievements, product roadmap and community contribution. Paolo Juvara Openbravo's Chief Products Officer and Ismael Ciordia Openbravo's Chief Technology Officer. Full presentation (PDF format).

- What is new in Openbravo R2.3x: Skins, Jasper Reports, Single sign-on. From a functional perspective: Accounting , Improved Openbravo Initial Client Setup (better error reporting). See complete release notes.
- Leassons learned: Improvement development practices, release management, target roadmap, leverage the community. Focus: quality and documentation.
- Openbravo Developer's edition: frequent releases, minimal QA process, publish features as soon as they are done.
- Openbravo Community Edition: stable, full QA process, release twice year. The recommended for production. See the Openbravo release policy.
- Product vision: productive, informative and collaborative, easy to understand, highly interoperable
- Product priorities: support exiting product, develop new functionality, broaden appeal to increase community, localization, develop next generation platform
- Documentation: functional documentation, developer's guide, implementation manual

· Openbravo development environment. Ismael Ciordia Openbravo's Chief Technology Officer and Adrián Romero, Senior Architect at Openbravo. Full presentation (PDF format).

- Code name ODE (Openbravo development environment): how to get the code, build from sources, update your environment, commit your changes to the Repository.
- Develop Openbravo using Eclipse. Projects files will be provided.
- All the database has been moved from a database dump to separate XML fields (better changes control) using DLLUtils. A single file for every table, trigger, etc.
- Fully enable PostgreSql as a development environment: build from sources, code development and commit changes to the repository
- ODE will be released and documented at the time that Openbravo ERP R2.35 is released (during November 2007).
- Use of Subversion ChangeLogs.

· Openbravo Green. Ismael Ciordia Openbravo's Chief Technology Officer and Adrián Romero, Senior Architect at Openbravo. Full presentation (PDF format).

- Open, modular, based on Open source stack.
- It is design to be easy to migrate from previous versions
- New MVC implementation based on Hibernate, Spring + Acegi, JSF (myFaces), DRW, Dojo
- If you are interested in commenting Green you can use Openbravo Green forum.
- See also Openbravo Green documentation.

· Localization and internationalization round table. Nicolás Serraro Openbravo's Chief Technological Strategist, Paolo Juvara Openbravo's Chief Products Officer and Jordi Mas Openbravo's Community Director. Full presentation (PDF format).

· Openbravo's community services. Josep Mitjà, Openbravo's COO and Jordi Mas Openbravo's Community Director. Full presentation (PDF format).

This is the last session of the event. It has been two days full of interesting presentations, talks and meeting people around the Openbravo ecosystem. In terms of participation it has been a success. Personally, the most relevant aspect has been great that everyone has given feedback in all the sessions is such a positive way and also had a very strong attitude regarding collaboration, sharing and participating in the Openbravo community.

Openbravo Get Together - highlights from 1st day

2007-10-27T09:20:00.000-07:00

Today was the first day of the Openbravo Get Together meeting. A full day dedicated to how to do business with Openbravo. We were around 120 people during the morning and around 80 during the evening.

Here a summary and links of today's main sessions.

· The why and How of Open Source Participation. Matt Asay, General Manager, Americas. Full presentation (PDF format).

Matt started with a cool video merging images of FC Barcelona with Openbravo and commenting on the success of our project and community.

Matt's presentation has been focus on the dynamics of open source business and economics and which are the market trends, customer's options (based on polls) and successful strategies.

Here are some highlights of his talk:

- If the community does not do well, the company will not do well.
- When someone copies your software, the proprietary vision is that people are stealing your software. In free software world, the vision is that people is using your software.
- The focus has to be on writing exceptional open source software.
- A big problem for any software startup is to get people to use your software (dissemination) , something that open source solves very well.
- Proprietary software, you pay up front, the customer assumes all the risk. With open source, the customer buys services after has evaluated the product.
- The failure of "express" editions from IBM/Oracle against open source database (you can not fool people).
- In all open source projects, 85% of development is done by less than 15 developers.
- GPL is the most suitable license for business.
- Forking happens when you fail to take care of your community (Compiere/Adempiere, Joomla/Mambo)
- 10 open source vendors will do over $10m in 2007.

· Openbravo in the world of ERP. Manel Sarasa, Openbravo's CEO. Full presentation (PDF format).

- Introduction to open source and Openbravo community.
- Analysis of the cost structure of Open source vs. proprietary companies.
- Expending on software for SME (licenses: SME 27%, support: 36%, maintenance: 37%). Source ODC. 2004
- ERP adoption is SME is still low. Licenses costs are a hug burden for small firms.
- Use the 30% of license cost to adapt your software to your needs.
- Openbravo vision: All companies, regardless of their size, need a management system adapted to their needs.
- Mission: aims to offer the best possible management system and the tools needed for successful development and implementation.

· Session: Success Stories. Eugeni Vives, Openbravo's Chief Consulting Officer. Full presentation (PDF format).

- 2001 started with the first live customer.
- Openbravo customer profile: €2 - 50M millions revenue, ten to several hundreds employees. Currently focusing on the SME (SoHo discarted).
- Industries: manufacturing, distribution & logistics, engineering, professional services, media & publishing, construction.
- Estimate d 90 live installations lead by Openbravo or its partners. 89% customers in Europe (80% Spain), 7% LATAM and rest from others. Many others from community that we cannot count.
- Alimarket publications (100 employees, revenues ~10m): first know live implementation with PostgreSQL.
- First verticals in construction and publishing industries.
- Next industries: public administration (Centatic), City Hall (City Hall of Amorebieta), Telecom industry (Poland).

· Session: Common Customer View Project (Open Solutions Alliance project). Josep Mitjà, Openbravo's COO and Adrián Romero, Senior Architect at Openbravo. Full presentation (PDF format).

- Mission of the Open Solutions Alliance is to expand the market for business open source solutions.
- Areas of work: customer adoption, interoperability, explain benefits of open solutions, community engagement
- Founded by ISVs.
- Customer view project focus: interoperability on single sign on and data synchronization.
- Companies involved: Openbravo, CentricCRM, Adaptive Planning, JasperSoft, SpikeSource, Unisys
- Single sign-on thanks too LAM and based on CAS.

· Session: LibrePos and Openbravo in the retail market. Adrián Romero, Senior Architect at Openbravo and LibrePos author. Full presentation (PDF format). Full presentation (PDF format).

- LibrePos is a point of sale application designed for touch screens with support for receipt printers, customer displays, barcode scanners, scales, etc
- Localized into English, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician.
- It written in Java, using Swing and it runs in any operating system that supports Java (Linux, Windows, etc).
- Openbravo has acquired LibrePos and will backup LibrePos development, allowing it to grow up quickly. LibrePOS supports synchronization with Openbravo ERP.
- Started on January 2005. Near 100.000 accumulated downloads since then. It has been in the #17 position at SourceForge ranking.
- There are installations of LibrePos in Spain, USA, Chine, Kenya, Netherlands, Canada, Honduras, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Romania, Italy, Portugal, among others.
- Future development: customer module (loyalty module, discounts), employees module (shift management), Restaurant module (kitchen printers, handhelds).

Tomorrow we will continue the Openbravo Get Together meeting with the technology day.

Related blog posts

Openbravo Get Together - Blogging After the First Session
Running the open-source bulls with Openbravo

Note: After the Openbravo Get Together finishes we will publish all the presentations in the main openbravo.com site.

Matt Asay, keynote speaker at Openbravo Get Together

2007-10-04T02:38:00.000-07:00

It has been confirmed just a few hours ago. Open source guru Matt Asay will be giving the inaugural keynote speech at the Openbravo Get Together event in Barcelona, Spain, which will take place from October 26th to 28th. His presentation ‘Community Capitalism: The Art of Corporate Involvement in Open Source Communities’ will take place on Saturday the 27th at 10:00 a.m. The keynote will identify the most successful mechanisms that commercial open source vendors and community open source projects have found to improve the depth and breadth of their communities, as well as how end users can derive significant benefits from participating in and contributing to relevant open source communities.

Matt Asay has ten years’ operational experience working with commercial open source technology, and regularly speaks and publishes on emerging open source business strategies and opportunities. He is considered one of the industry’s leading open source business strategists and is a prolific blogger on open source, where he is a regular contributor to ZDNet and CNET. Asay co-founded Novell's Linux Business Office in 2002 and was an early agitator and architect for the company's shift to open source. He is currently the VP Business Development of open source content management vendor Alfresco, a board member at Open Source Initiative and advisor of several leading open source vendors.

Please, for those that are willing to attend any conference in the event, please remember to register in here. Since Saturday and Sunday are open and free attendance days and capacity is limited early registration will guarantee a place for you in the event.

Hope to see you in there ;-)

Openbravo community highlights 2nd of October

2007-10-02T01:15:00.000-07:00

Hello everybody,

There are some news that happened during the past weeks:

Openbravo product roadmap has been updated. It reflects the major releases that we are planing to produce.
We have started to collect feedback about how to improve our Wiki that is currently our main point for documentation. Check the ideas that we have until now and feel free to include yours.
In the last weeks we have released the localizations for Australia and Brazil. Localizations for Galicia, France, Iran, South Africa have some results published that you can start to test them (they are in Subversion since they are not released yet) and help to enhance their quality giving your feedback.
In the documentation front there are lots of news thanks to the many contributions that we are getting:

A German and Spanish specific documentation sections on the Wiki that collect all the documentation available for Openbravo on those languages.
User Migration guide for Openbravo R2.3, that explains the User Interface differences between the Openbravo 2.33 version and the previous versions.
Rapid Openbravo Development using Eclipse IDE, that explains how to setup an Openbravo development environment using Eclipse.
A little setup guide, that explains how to quickly setup Openbravo for a production environment.
A document that explains how to define new Skins (look and feel) for Openbravo.
Many contributors new to source control systems have not used Subversion before. We created a document that explains how to use Subversion in the Openbravo project.

That's all for now. If you have any news regarding Openbravo success or efforts, please let me know (jmas at openbravo.com)

Openbravo GetTogether meeting in Barcelona October 26-28

2007-09-09T09:08:00.001-07:00

These are very exciting times for Openbravo project. After the launch of Openbravo R2.3 with an improved user interface, a revamped look and feel and lots of new features we got very good feedback from media, community and costumers. We are going to release Openbravo R2.34 very soon that also will address many of the suggestions that we have received. Thanks to all for your cooperation!

Openbravo activity is growing very fast in all fronts and we have thought that will be very good to get together for two days and share experiences, ideas from all of you.

During October 27-28 we are holding the Openbravo GetTogether community days in Barcelona, Spain. This is an informal meeting free of access to everyone. On the 26th there is a meeting for Openbravo partners only.

We welcome to the community days all the different people on the Openbravo ecosystem: developers, consultants, users, companies, partners, and newcomers. The objective of the event is get all together and share experiences around Openbravo ERP technology. We also welcome people from other open source projects.

Meet with the main Openbravo developers, learn about our plans for the future, Openbravo success cases and how to make business and do successfully implementations.

If you are going to attend, we have information about estimated cost of flights, accommodation, visa requirements and other information that you may find useful.

We encourage everyone to propose presentations, success cases, round tables or key note speakers. Please, send you ideas to the forum thread created for this event.

We will keep you posted with news and the updates of the schedule in the next days.

See you all in Barcelona!

Note: Please, make sure that you register in the event using the registration form.

Openbravo developments for next weeks

2007-08-29T07:30:00.000-07:00

A few people has been asking us different questions about which our actual direction is in terms of product, roadmap, database model, so. Let me summarize some areas that we at Openbravo are focusing in the next couple of weeks:

Next version of Openbravo is going to be Openbravo R2.34. It is currently scheduled for end of September. We will be publishing upgrade scripts and we will recommend this version for production environments. This version will be focus on providing bug fixes for know issues. If you are working with Openbravo R2.33 and are you are experiencing a bug, check if has been already ready reported, and if not read our bug reporting guidelines and report it to us. We need your collaboration to make the next version rock solid!
Roadmap update. Paolo Juvara has already started a process to collect feedback from our community in terms of which areas of the product will you like to see enhancements and which areas we you like us to focus. We will use this feedback to set our roadmap for the next couple of months. Please, if you have ideas or comments for Openbravo ERP, let us know.
Documentation. As you probably have seen we have updated Openbravo User Manual to version 2.3, we are working on a Developer's Manual, the E/R data model and other related documents. Our most important goal in terms of documentation is to keep updating our current documentation and work to enhance it and publish a complete configuration manual (there is a tentative index available). We are aware that documenting Openbravo configuration will lower the entry barrier for newcomers.
We are currently working on moving from a single binary database dump file to a system that will allow to define our data model in different separate files. This is very important because will make possible to isolate changes in the data model and will permit to leverage bug fixes more easily between different versions of Openbravo. Adrián Romero has already started a public discussion about the best of way of addressing this issue. If you have comments or ideas, please let us know.
Many people asks when it will be possible to build Openbravo ERP from sources using PostgreSQL (right now can only be done using Oracle). This is closely related to the previous point of moving away from a single database dump. This is a priority for us and we hope to have it ready soon.
Openbravo Green. We are very excited about it and we have received some great comments on the initial designs. We will be updating our roadmap for it for the next couple of months but currently we are devoting our senior development staff to the Openbravo R2.3x branch, to make sure that we are delivering matches people's expectations in terms of functionality and quality.
We are defining our release policy for Openbravo. Our objective is to have more regular builds to involve the community better and also to make more clear which versions we recommend for production and which ones for testing. We will be sharing a proposal with everyone very soon. Also, we will be publish the scripts for our installers to make people build their installers.

We are working hard to make all of these points a reality, however our resources are limited. If you can commit resources in terms of helping in these areas your help is very welcome.

If you have any other specific question, please do not hesitate to ask us posting in this forum thread.

Openbravo community highlights 3rd of August 2007

2007-08-02T23:52:00.000-07:00

Hello everybody,

Openbravo R2.33 has just been released. You can already download it or try the on-line demo. We have been working very hard to make this version rock solid. R2.33 contains many new features and bug fixes, including a complete review of the English and Spanish terminology and language used in the application (see this post and English_Language_Changes_OBR23.zip).

We also have defined the criteria for releasing Openbravo builds, that is, the list of tests performed by Openbravo every time that a release is packaged from the SVN tree.

There are also more news that happened during the past weeks:

There is a new document at Openbravo Wiki that explains how to create new looks and feel for Openbravo.
We have created the Openbravo technical specifications that explain the technologies used and requiered by Openbravo ERP.
Daniel Hukkelhoven from Dalox has published a draft version of the char of accounts for Netherlands. Any feedback is welcome.

One of the important areas that we are still working is moving from our current database dump file system to a new approach where we have the data model separated in different files. This is will greatly improve our version control capabilities and will make more easy for people to leverage patches between different versions. There is a forum thread where we are discussing the best approach.

That's all for now. If you have any news regarding Openbravo success or efforts, please let me know (jmas at openbravo.com)

Openbravo at OSCON 2007

2007-07-18T11:53:00.000-07:00

This week Fernando Iriazabal (Openbravo developer), Ismael Ciordia (Openbravo CTO) and Jordi Mas (me) will be travelling to the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (23 of July - 27 of July) in Portland, Oregon. We will be joining the 2500 participants that are attending this year. During the first two days we will be in Open Solutions Alliance stand (participating in their interoperability hack-a-thon) in the exhibitors area with other Openbravo folks and OSA members and from Wednesday we will be attending the sessions and meeting other open source companies and people.

If you want to meet us just come to the OSA stand in the OSCON exhibitor area and ask for any us. We will see you there!

Second phase: vote Openbravo in SourceForge 2007 Community Choice Awards

2007-07-04T08:50:00.000-07:00

Thanks to everyone that helped to nominate Openbravo ERP for the Best Project, Most Collaborative Project and Best Project for the Enterprise categories in the SourceForge 2007 Community Choice Awards. We also to congratulate to all the other projects that got also nominated!

Now the second phase has started and the voting period is open until the 20th of July to choose between the nominated projects the ones that will win in their categories.

Please consider voting for Openbravo ERP project under the Best Project, Most Collaborative Project and Best Project for the Enterprise categories. You have to be a registered SourceForge user to be able to vote. Thanks for your support!

Openbravo community highlights 19th of June 2007

2007-06-19T01:37:00.000-07:00

Hello everybody,

There are some news that happened during the past weeks:

Joannès Vermorel informs me that Lokad has added support for Openbravo ERP. Lokad is an online time-series forecast that provides demand forecasting, inventory planning, staff scheduling and capacity optimization.
A few people from the Openbravo community have been requesting us to add support in our installers for new platforms. Last week we published the Openbravo R2.22 installers for FreeBSD 6, Linux 64-bits, Solaris Intel and Solaris SPARC.
We have started to build a list of special requirements needed in certain regions and countries for ERP systems that may require custom development of Openbravo. This list is aim to help other localizers to identify similar issues in their regions and to collect information about international requirements that may be added in future versions of Openbravo. Please, if you are aware of special needs that Openbravo may need to operate in your region or country added them to list.

That's all for now. If you have any news regarding Openbravo success or efforts, please let me know (jmas at openbravo.com)

Openbravo ERP R2.30 news and updated roadmap

2007-06-15T07:05:00.000-07:00

After much effort we have released Openbravo R2.30 alpha version (only with Oracle support for this alpha). A preview version to show what we have been working on the last months. 2.30 alpha had 3.000 downloads in less than two weeks and Openbravo ERP project has been ranked #2 top project in SourceForge since its launch. The new version introduces many new features (like JasperReports integration) and a complete and sexy new look.

Our current tentative schedule for version R2.30 is to release a beta version before the end of June and a final R2.30 version during the first two weeks of July.

We have also updated our roadmap for the next months to accommodate the needs that our users have been pointing out and rescheduled it according to the resources that we have available.

Vote Openbravo for Best Software and Best Software for the Enterprise on SourceForge 2007 Community Choice Awards

2007-06-05T01:26:00.000-07:00

Today SourceForge has started the voting for the SourceForge 2007 Community Choice Awards. Openbravo has been hosting its project at SourceForge since April 2006.

From the SourceForge web site you can read:

"The SourceForge.net team is proud to present our second annual Community Choice Awards. Winners are selected by community members like you, and it's that time again! Cast a ballot for your favorite projects now and make your voice heard."

The awards will be given to the winning projects on the 26st of July during the Open Source Convention in Porland.

During the last year we have been working very hard pushing a very ambitious roadmap, opening up our development process, creating documentation (user, developers manuals, and dozens of technical notes), reviewing Openbravo accounting system or designing a new user interface.

Our community has taken the important responsibility of localizating Openbravo to 24 countries making it ready for those countries, giving support to new and already exiting users through our forums, localizing materials to different languages, reporting loads of bugs and enhancements ideas or launching initiatives like Openbravofans in China.

Please consider voting for the Openbravo ERP project under the Best Project for Enterprise category and the Best Project. You have to be a registered SourceForge user to be able to vote.

Openbravo workshop in LinuxTag to review the German localization

2007-05-23T01:14:00.000-07:00

Jens Wilke (from Headissue GmbH) has organised a workshop next Thursday, 31 of May in the LinuxTag in Berlin, Germany.

As you know Jens Wilke and Birgit Matthaei have been doing an extraordinary work localizing Openbravo for Germany. They have already a translation into German language (except for the Help file) and also a beta version of the an account of charts file for Germany.

Jens will give a short introduction to Openbravo and gives a status of the ongoing German localization effort. After that a discussion is planed to brainstorm what adoptions and functionality is important for Germany (such as electronic tax filing) and what the (German) users expect from the system.

Everyone is invited to participate and give a feedback on who to prioritize and organize the further activities. If you are working on other Openbravo localization, feel also free to show up and comment with us how is your effort going.

More details: Openbravo ERP - Einführung und Status der deutschen Anpassung

More resources for developers

2007-05-20T23:09:00.000-07:00

We are very excited. In the next few days Openbravo R2.30 beta version is going to be released. It is going to be an important milestone for our users and developers, introducing among others, a new user interface.

Since the beginning we envision Openbravo as a web based ERP and also as a platform capable of developing web-based applications following a MDD/MVC architecture completely decoupled from the ERP.

Last week we published Openbravo Entity-Relationship (E/R) database diagram, a fundamental tool for those willing to customize Openbravo for their needs or for people willing to develop verticals or do custom development. The E/R diagram provides a clear picture of how Openbravo functionality is related to the data model.

Also, another important document that has entered a beta from this week is Openbravo Developers Manual. As the name indicates, its aim is to provide a full reference for those interested in new Openbravo functionalities, verticals or customizations for specific customer needs. We really appreciate any feedback on these documents.

And finally, we have updated the look of Openbravo Wiki, the central point to obtain documentation for Openbravo project.

Happy birthday Openbravo community

2007-05-08T01:20:00.000-07:00

Openbravo started under the name of Tecnicia S.L back in 2001. At the time, the company was looking for an open-source web-based ERP for its customers. Since no suitable solution was found, we started to build our own solution based on another ERP called Compiere, that was available only as a Java client at the time.

From 2003 and until 2006 five people worked full time on the project (the team grew to 11 people by that time) developing new functionality for customers of different business sectors. During the that time the source code was delivered to our customers.

At the beginning of 2006, Openbravo secured an investment of 5 million Euros with the public venture capital fund Sodena. The objective was to build the best open source web based ERP and become an international player.

On April 18th 2006 Openbravo announced the release of Openbravo ERP R2.0 and published the source code at SourceForge. We started opening our development process using the bug tracking, source control and public forums at SourceForge to carry out our development.

During the first three months of public live of Openbravo one of the most recurrent requests that we received was to add support for PostgreSQL database engine. After a few months of work and as an answer to our community requests we released a new version of Openbravo with support for PostgreSQL database.

On September 2006, just five months after publishing the project at SourceForge, the project was ranked project number 6 in SourceForge ranking. That month, Openbravo ERP had 18.128 downloads and 420 messages in its forums, showing the growing interest for Openbravo.

Since the beginning we believed that all the documentation of our project had to be libre and free. The initial documentation was published in SourceForge but after a few months we launched the Openbravo Wiki that helped to vertebrate the collaboration efforts around of our project. Also, helped to vertebrate the localization of this documents to other languages like Spanish and Chinese.

We kept working on opening our development making our roadmap publically available, letting people to prioritize it, setting up a IRC channel to ease the communication between community members, setting up our own Planet and publishing for discussing Openbravo Green, our next platform generation.

On St. Valentine's Day of this year, the Open Solutions Alliance was presented. Openbravo is a founder member and it has been working since its conception in establishing synergies with other projects and open communities.

Last April, one year after of our debut in SourceForge, the statistics for that month were respectable: 72 bugs opened (44 closed), 488 messages in our forums, 22.775 downloads (6.681 product downloads), 21 registered localizations of which four projects are completed.

What are the challenges for next year? Keep building the participation and communication channels and the necessary infrastructure to encourage the steady growth of our community.

Let's make it happen!

Openbravo community highlights 3rd of May 2007

2007-05-03T00:40:00.000-07:00

Hello everybody,

There are some news that happened during the past days:

raulcosminm has published the Chart of Accounts for Romania. If you live in Romania please help us to test the new localization.
Rok Lenardic has been working on a document that explain how to install Openbravo from the command line on Fedora. It is going to be extended to support Debian installations soon.

That's all for now. If you have any news regarding Openbravo success or efforts, please let me know (jmas at openbravo.com)

Openbravo community highlights 12th of April 2007

2007-04-12T01:20:00.000-07:00

Hello everybody,

There are some news that happened during the past days:

Jens Wilke and Birgit Matthaei have almost completed the localization of the German version (except for the Help file) including an account of charts file for Germany. They are looking for feedback of their work.
Due to popular demand, we now have a new page at the Wiki explaining how to translate documentation to other languages. This allows to localize Openbravo Wiki content, like the user manual or the installation instructions, into other languages.
Dejinlee, Xin.lv and LinuxWind are leading the translation of the Openbravo user manual into Simplified Chinese. They already have made some nice progress.
We have also opened a new Chinese support forum that we hope will complement the excellent job done by the Openbravofans project.
Patrick Beaucamp from BPM Conseil has put together a proposal for Dataware house integration with Openbravo ERP. Any feedback or comments are welcome.
I send a proposal to translate the user manual into Spanish. ¿Alguien se anima?

That's all for now. If you have any news regarding Openbravo success or efforts, please let me know (jmas at openbravo.com)

Openbravo community highlights 29th of March 2007

2007-03-29T10:29:00.000-07:00

Hello everybody,

There are some news that happened during the past days:

We have updated our product roadmap. Release 2.30 has been delayed a bit but new functionality is going to be included. Also we have detailed the roadmap for Openbravo R.2 until the end of the year and we have give more details about the current roadmap for Openbravo R3 (the new platform due mid 2008). Soon, we will publish new details of the new platform and ask everyone in the community for feedback.
We have finished documenting the localisation of Openbravo using PO files. This new way of translating the application (is still possible to use XML) makes more easy the translation and allows to leverage all the popular tools that support PO format.

That's all for now.

See you at Cebit

2007-03-13T08:42:00.000-07:00

Openbravo is going to be this year at Cebit in Hannover, Germany. Cebit is the largest computer tradeshow in the world with around 700.000 visitors. Cebit starts on the 15th of March and ends on the 21st.

Openbravo stand is located at Hall 5 Booth No: F 58/2. (in the Linux park area).

If you want to discuss any localization or community issue, I'm going to be in our stand from Monday 19th until Wednesday 21st of March. Looking forward to talk to you there.

Openbravo community highlights 9th of March 2007

2007-03-08T21:52:00.000-08:00

Hello everybody,

There are some news that happened during the past days:

Dai Bo, Xin.Lv, Jeff Wang and Fat Dog and another contributors around the openbravofans.net community have completed the Chinese localization of Openbravo. This is the second localization completed by the Openbravo community and the fourth available for Openbravo ERP (also available in English, Spanish and Italian). You can get it from our download area.
We have started a Wiki page where we are collecting project ideas for people that wants to start contributing to Openbravo. Do you have more ideas? Do you want to lead some of the projects? Let us know through our developers forum.
Matt Asay at Infoworld is running a story about Openbravo commenting in his success at Sourceforge and Matt's vision of ERP market.

That's all folks!

Openbravo community highlights 26/02/2007

2007-02-26T00:38:00.000-08:00

Hello everybody,

There are some news that happened during the past days:

Miguel Armas from CanaryTek has updated our pre-installed and pre-configured application Virtual appliances to Openbravo version 2.22. They are available from SourceForge. There also step by step on-line instructions.
I have been working on Openbravo documentation style guide. It does attempt nor desire to cover all aspects of technical writing. The objective is to be concise and focused for Openbravo documentation writers. Please, feel free to give suggestions or comments in our documentation forum. I also have created a small Help page explaining how to edit documents our Wiki.
Some community members in the Spanish support forum are starting an effort to document Openbravo processes and workflows. There is an early draft is already published.

Also in case the you missed Earthweb has an interesting article Ten Leading Open Source Innovators about companies that are innovative. Not all of them are open source or innovating so much but still very interesting.

Openbravo community highlights 17/02/2007

2007-02-17T10:05:00.000-08:00

This is the first of a series of posts that I will write regularly to highlight the news and accomplishments around the Openbravo community.

Some recent news:

Openbravo roadmap has been updated and extended a few days back providing extra detail on new features. You are welcome to give your feedback in our developers forum.
Our engineering team have been successfully tested Openbravo on Microsoft Windows Vista and Java 6.
The III Libro blanco de software libre en España (3rd white book on free software in Spain) was presented last week. Openbravo was invited to write an article about "Creating Value" in open source companies.
Decio Franchin, a student mastering at Bournemouth University in UK, is requesting help for his research around the viability of ERPs for SME. Can you help him?

I will try to keep this compilation rolling every week. Feel free to send me achievements that you have done around Openbravo.

Knock Knock

2007-01-10T02:19:00.000-08:00

This my first post from Blogger. At Openbravo I'm in charge of our community services. This new channel will help us to communicate to everyone our progress and get direct feedback from the community.

For any comment or suggestion I'm always available at jmas at openbravo.com

Regards