Openbravo Community voting period starts

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

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

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

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.

Participation for the awards takes place in two phases, so please keep in mind the following dates:

• 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

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

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

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!