Matt Asay, keynote speaker at Openbravo Get Together

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!