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.
Monday, March 17, 2008
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Openbravo community plans for 2008
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:
Anyone willing to provide additional services or resources to help to build our community is more than welcome.
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.
Anyone willing to provide additional services or resources to help to build our community is more than welcome.
Friday, January 25, 2008
Openbravo community highlights 25th of January
Hello everybody,
There are some news that happened during the past weeks:
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.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Second chat community meeting summary
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.
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.
Monday, January 14, 2008
Second community chat meeting on 22nd of January at 14.00 GMT
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.
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.
Friday, December 21, 2007
Openbravo and eZ Publish interoperability
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.
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.
Monday, December 17, 2007
Openbravo stable versions policy
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.
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.
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