A new Openbravo Wiki main page rolls out

After a few weeks of work we are very excited to present our new homepage for the Openbravo Wiki.

One of the objectives of the new design was to give its own entity and weight to the Openbravo POS project. This project joined the Openbravo family when the Wiki was already working. In the recent months, Openbravo POS documentation has been growing and required a more nicer fit. Now, when you enter the main page you have two tabs that allow you to switch the content for both projects.

Openbravo Wiki is currently the main entrance to our community with currently 20.715 unique visitors (July 2008) and experiencing a steady monthly grow of 10%. We wanted to give more visibility to other news that happen around the project every week like the blogging and the Subversion activity.

We have a new 'Editorial content' area that will help us to highlight these important issues that have occurred around the project. On the bottom of the page, you have the new collaboration area where you have the fundamental links for these interested in start contributing to the project.

Gil Forcada has been also working on enhancing our documentation for the Wiki and establishing guidelines for the style and the content. Very soon he will be sharing with us some examples of how we can do better documents in the Wiki.

If you have suggestions for improvement let us know.

News from the Openbravo ERP localization front

In the last days many things regarding Openbravo ERP localization have occurred that we would like to share with you:

• Openbravo ERP R2.40 beta was released last week. The estimated effort of updating the translations from Openbravo ERP R2.3x to Openbravo ERP 2.40 is 5.000 words. This is a two days work effort of a full time translation. Rafa Roda, from Openbravo S.L, has already updated the Spanish localization to version 2.40. Starting from Openbravo R2.40 the only language pack that is included by default in Openbravo ERP is English. Spanish language, can be downloaded from SourceForge and installed like the rest of the additional languages.
  
  
• Phil Heenan has been working on Openbravo2PO as part of a more ambitious plan of enhancing the whole translation process for Openbravo ERP. Phil has already asked for feedback on his enhancements for the process. As result of his work, Openbravo2PO is now the tool that we recommend for translating Openbravo ERP and PO the recommended format. Openbravo2PO has been already used successfully in the German, Italian and Spanish translation efforts.
  
  
• Eduardo Argal (ear at openbravo dot com) is the new localization coordinator at Openbravo replacing me in this role. He is part of the localization Openbravo team and has a great experience in accounting and localization. If you have any questions regarding localization we recommend to use Openbravo ERP localization forum.
  
  
• Kenzo Repole, the localizer for Saudia Arabia, has been working on adding RTL (right-to-left) support for Openbravo. This will be part of Openbravo ERP R2.50. If you are interested in helping us in enhancing RTL support please contact Eduardo Argal (ear at openbravo dot com).
  

That's all for now.

Openbravo POS packages for OpenSuse and Fedora

Using the wonderful Opensuse build service I have built a set of packages for OpenSuse and Fedora. You can download them from:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/openbravo/

The packages for Fedora should work well under CentOS and Red Hat. You have the source code of the packages available and also a bug report with some know issues.

Please, let me know if you have any issue installing these packages.

Notice that these provided as they are. Use at your own risk.

Fourth community chat meeting on 18th of June at 14.00 GMT: the roadmap discussion

As many of you already know, we are having bimonthly community chat meetings.

The sole objective is this chat meeting is to discuss with you our planed roadmap. Some of the discussion already has started in our forums following Paolo's call for your feedback.

If you are planning to develop a module or feature for Openbravo this is a good opportunity also to synchronize efforts.

Here you have all the information for the fourth meeting:

Date: 18th of June 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. If you are not familiar with the chats, we have a Wiki page that explains how to setup the software and get connected.

Openbravo community survey results

Thanks to the many people that participated on the first Openbravo community survey.

I would like to share with you some of the main conclusions:

· 50.77% of respondents work for micro SME companies
· 47,69% of respondents are people related to information technology or software developers
· 52.31% of respondents have have less than 1 year of experience using ERPs
· 33.85% of respondents never worked in an open source community before
· The main areas of planned contributions of the respondents are participating in the forums and doing localizations
· 81.54% of of respondents use PostgreSQL

These results helps us to better understand the background and objectives of our community members.

Regarding Openbravo ERP product feedback, we got the following results (been 5 the maximum):

· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's extensibility capabilities? 3,2 (Absolute deviation 0,82)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's customisation capabilities? 3,35 (Absolute deviation 0,96)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's installation? 3,31(Absolute deviation 0,98)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's functionality? 3,55 (Absolute deviation 0,67)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's documentation? 2,5 (Absolute deviation 1,04)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's quality? 3,45 (Absolute deviation 0,81)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's performance? 3,16 (Absolute deviation 0,81)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's ease of use? 3,29 (Absolute deviation 1,00)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's ease of contributing? 3,17 (Absolute deviation 0,86)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's business value? 3,73 (Absolute deviation 0,73)
· How do you rate your overall satisfaction with Openbravo ERP's? 3,56 (Absolute deviation 0,8)

I would like to comment on some of these results:

· Installation used to be a major area of complaints for Openbravo ERP due to the number of components that are part of his stack and are needed to run the application. The installation process was enhanced when we licensed BitRock technology for Openbravo installers. We created also more documentation for the installation process, that many people helped us to enhance. The use of virtual images for evaluation also helped to easy the evaluation process. With Openbravo 2.40 we have fixed many small issues with the installer, that should help to rise the user's level of satisfaction.

· We know that documentation is a weak point of the product. Openbravo has been lately working a lot on this area and the community has played an important role. We have recently opened a full time position to put our documentation in good shape.

· We are very happy with the product quality results of the survey. There is no doubt that this has been one of the major areas of improvement during last year. Much better processes in place, the acceptance test or the opening of the Quality Assurance to our community. We are already in the process to deploy a more powerful bug tracking system that will allow us have a better control on Quality Assurance issues. We invite you to participate in the Quality Assurance efforts and assure that the bugs that are critical for you get fixed.

· Regarding extensibility capabilities that is going to be one of the major areas of improvements for Openbravo 2.50, specially on terms of plugins, verticals and its packing. We will shortly be sharing our plans regarding this.

· Regarding easy of contributing is something that we have still to work hard. We have the contributor's guide and some good process in place and a Forge collaboration platform coming in the next months, but still there are many things to do.

That's all for now. If you have any comments or suggestion please comment on!

3 days left to participate in the Community Survey

A few days ago, we launched our first Community Survey to better understand the background and objectives of our Community Members. We would really appreciate it if you could spend a couple of minutes filling the survey and giving us, in an anonymous format, some data points on your interests in the Openbravo projects.

The information collected is going to help us to prioritize our community activities, infrastructure investments and other aspects.

Go to http://openbravo.questionform.com/public/Openbravo-Community-Event-Survey and make your opinion count!

Thanks a lot for your help!

Openbravo Get Together June 21st and 22nd in Miami, United States

During June 21st and 22nd we will be holding the Openbravo Get Together in Miami, United States. The agenda is already available. There is a business day where you will get the insights of how to do business with Openbravo products and a technology day focus on Openbravo technology, product's roadmaps, localization and community services. The language of the event is English.

This is a great opportunity to learn about Openbravo products, do peer-to-peer networking and to share experiences with other Openbravo user's and developers. The Openbravo Get Together's are free and open to everyone, you only have to register. During this Get Together Brian Reale from Colosa Inc. will be visiting us and presenting the benefits of Colosa's open source workflow products and how they can add more value to Openbravo ERP implementations.

We are looking forward to meet you in Miami. If you have any suggestion or comment for this event please let us know.