Openbravo community highlights 4th of December

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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.