Openbravo World Conference - Community Day 2

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