Hi all,

Since it's my first post in Planet Openbravo I should introduce myself:

I'm Gil Forcada, working at Openbravo in the community department (as Jordi already introduced me). For any comments or suggestions I'm always available at gil.forcada at openbravo dot com
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Looping back to the title, finally, the slides and their audio are available online. So, if you didn't get the chance to be there or you want to listen again any presentation it's your opportunity.

We hope it will be useful.

Regards,

This is my first blog despite of the fact I have been working in Openbravo for more than two years. I have been doing several different tasks in the development team during this time, and at this moment I am in charge of the Community Support Team. Our tasks involves any task that could make easier to approach Openbravo to the Community as answering forums, fixing bugs, writing documentation, looking for new tools, helping with design suggestions for community projects and contributions, etc. I am sure you will be thinking about why I have just decided to write this blog after so long period. The reason is clear: I have something to tell you.

Openbravo is doing a big effort in order to improve its quality and one of the main focus areas is the Bug fixing. During this year more than four hundred bugs have been reported and more than a 90% have been fixed. One of main Openbravo's aim is to reduce drastically the number of opened bugs in 2.40 release. To fulfill this objective we have made a realistic estimation to reduce the number of opened bugs below 250 once the 2.40 beta version was released. It is a conservative estimation due to no have unlimited resources. In Openbravo we are sure that with the Community's help we could improve these results and the most important thing, to make a better product. You can see our expectations and follow the real evolution here: Openbravo ERP bugs evolution.

I am sure that with your help we will make it happen !!!!

Being a channel manager (as you might know in channel management we are responsible for the growth of our partner network), this is a question I get many times. It is quite logical that this question frequently comes up, since we are not charging any license fees for our award winning ERP solution. Moreover, we are not distributing the solution as a “black box” of which you have no idea how it is working (if we would do this and in addition charge license fees it could also be called a proprietary model ;-) ), yet in our case anyone can see how the product has been built because the source code is visible and readily available through a download from Sourceforge. In addition, all documentation about the product we have is published and freely available through our Wiki. Therefore, I can understand where the question comes from.

Many know that Open Source (OS) is a business model under which applications are developed and commercialized on a way that is revolutionizing the software industry. All OS companies tend to have different strategies of monetizing on the dissemination of their product, but most have one thing in common: the delivery of services.

Openbravo is no different in this way; the sale and delivery of services is our primary source of revenues. Services that we offer cover anything a partner might need to be successful in selling and implementing Openbravo solutions (ERP and POS). Some service types are fee-based, like training - support - custom development - consultancy, and thus provide an important source of revenues for our firm.

To grow our business we count with our network of partners who implement Openbravo for their clients. Our recently launched Openbravo Network has been offered in addition to the existing free community edition. We are convinced that Openbravo Network is an innovative solution offering the first real subscription-based “ERP-in-a-box” solution at a competitive price that enables partners to increase their economic returns with a “peace-of-mind” offering for users, while also generating further revenues for Openbravo.

So if I would have to answer the question in the title of this post in one sentence it would be: “Our success depends on our partner’s success”. If our partners do well in building a successful business around Openbravo, we will also do well as a company. That is why we put so much effort in delivering high quality and specifically designed services.

Do we make money? Yes we do! Our partners are quite successful in building an ERP practice with our product. One of our Dutch partners told me that they on average receive one call per day from a potential client. This is a great example of the market opportunity in the ERP space and the dissemination power of Open Source.

So if you work at, or for that matter own, an IT company and are interested in growing with us do not hesitate to apply for our partner program. We will contact you shortly after registration to evaluate if there is a fit between our companies.

I was in Extremadura last Friday on the Festival Tecnologico at Santos de Maimona, Extremadura, Spain. It has been great to see again their vision in open source. For those of you who do not know, Extremedura is the poorest region in Spain. They missed the industrial revolution all together; thus since the beginning of 2000 politicians have been trying to ensure that Extremadura does not miss the information society revolution as well.

I arrived to the event on Thursday evening. Olga drove me one hour and half (thanks so much) from Seville airport to Santos de Maimona. At night, we had dinner in a traditional and home-run restaurant with Olga, Alex and Tony from Fundation Maimona and Jose María Figueres, ex-president of Costa Rica and a wise man. My first dinner ever with a president or ex-president of a country. The conversation was focus on regional and rural development and information society issues. It was like been on a club of the Economist readers.

Next day the conference started. I had the opportunity to listen to Carlos Castro Castro (I actually helped to translated one of his articles into Catalan back in 2003). He talked about the strong commitment of the Extremadura government towards open source, materialized, among other things, in the Linex distribution.

Arround 14.00 the panel about open source and business started. My presentation was mainly focus on highlighting the possibilities that open source offers to companies and what Openbravo can provide as solution. I had lunch with a couple of people and some of the ideas interesting comments were made:

· Many people still thinks that an ERP in just an advanced accounting program. This is obviously far from reality not only from a functionality point of view also for the effort that an ERP solution requires to be implemented.

· Some people are abandoning home-grown solutions and looking at Openbravo as product and platform to build their next generation of solutions instead of investing in their own product (I blogged about this time ago).

Next stop is Galicia. I have a close relationship with Galicia since my book Software libre. Tecnicamente viábel, economicamente sostíbel e socialmente xusto (in Galician) was published two years ago. I'm going to be talking on the 14 of May at University of Vigo. Keep tunned in our site more details.

Apal Informatique (http://www.apal.ro) has completed the Romanian translation of Openbravo R2.35. A few months back, Raul Moldovan completed the chart of accounts for Romania. Now, with both contributions there is a full localization of Openbravo R2.35 for Romania. (0 comments)

To create new reports or to modify existing ones has been a painful task for Openbravo POS developers. Although the engine used is JasperReports and there are great tools to create new reports like iReport. To include a new report in Openbravo POS you needed to create a new java file to define the title, SQL sentence, parameters, and all the report parameters, to modify the menus, to compile the application and pray...

The next release of Openbravo POS, the version 2.10, includes a new model to develop reports and charts, and as a proof of concept all the reports bundled with Openbravo POS has been ported to the new model. With the new model you do not need neither to touch any single line of source code nor to compile the application. With this new model you will decrease the time and money you need to implement Openbravo POS and to adapt it to your business needs and legal requirements.

New reports and charts can be included just adding plain text files to the Openbravo POS folder /reports. A report consist in three files: The configuration file, the report file and the translations file. The configuration file is the most important one, there you define the title, the SQL sentence to get the report data, parameters, fields, what is the report file and what is the translations file. The report file is the JasperReports file and you can edit this file with iReport. And the translations file is used to define literals that need to be translated.

The bundled Openbravo POS reports are great to have a look if you want to include your own reports in the application, there you will find examples of all the possibilities to create new reports for Openbravo POS.

We are in the final stages of the Openbravo 2.40 development cycle and the release is getting ready to enter the alpha phase. We have found a few more issues and decided to do a bit more clean up to eliminate some obsolete code; this will take a couple of extra days and cause a bit of delay compared to my last update, but we are now fairly confident that we should have an installer ready by mid next week.

Since we are now only a few days away from that milestone, it is time to ask for community volunteers to help us with the acceptance test before we open the public alpha process.

If you are interested in participating in the acceptance test, please notify us by sending an email to collaborate@openbravo.com.

1. The product installs and works on all the most important operating systems (we will certainly test Linux and Windows but we hope that you will help us in testing other platforms as well; for 2.40, we will also have a Mac installer - any takers?)
The product installs and works against both Oracle and PostgreSQL.
The product can be installed from sources.
All the major flows are in working condition.
The new features are complete and stable.

We will give volunteers early access to the installer through a private FTP server. You will essentially receive the release at the same time as our QA team.
We will give you access to our test plans so that you can see what to test (but you can test any flow you like as well).
We will ask you to give us frequent updates on your progress.
1. If you have problems or doubts during the process, we will respond to your messages using the newly created Early Releases Discussion forum.
We will publish a daily status update on that same forum.

Acceptance testing should start in the middle of next week (as soon as the installer is ready) and last 10 working days. This is longer than I had announced in my previous post because we have reviewed our historical data and saw that we never completed this step in less than 2 weeks before. We will try to beat this date but we do not want to be overly optimistic either.

We look forward to your continued support to our project and your participation in this important test.

Openbravo Community contributor Victor Gaspar published a few days back a message where he shared with the community how he has managed to customize Openbravo ERP for some of his specific needs. For some time now, we wanted to have a code snippets section in our Wiki. Code snippets are small pieces of reusable code, like small cooking recipes.

We have created a category in the Openbravo Wiki called Code Snippets to hold documents that contain these pieces of reusable code. If you have small samples of how to customize Openbravo, small changes to the code that you think that may be useful to other people, please create a new page on the Openbravo Wiki and add it to this new category. You can also use the template CodeSnippets, like it is done in the already existent documents, to provide information of your snippets in a structured way.

You can check Victor's snippets CustomRemittance, AddFieldWebService and PrintButton. If you need any help or assistance on this, please do not hesitate to write to the developer's forum.

Last weekend during the Openbravo Get Together in Barcelona we presented the Openbravo Manifesto (which was published both in English and Spanish). For a long time, many of us at Openbravo S.L wanted to clarify the extent of our commitment to Openbravo ERP and POS projects, and open source in general; we also wanted to share our values and belief with our Community. Openbravo was born as an open source project and some of its values are deeply rooted in the company.

The manifesto highlights Openbravo's company values: transparency, openness, collaboration, meritocracy, leadership, excellence and gratitude. We strive to live and keep these values in mind in everything that we do.

Most importantly, the Manifesto also highlights Openbravo company's commitments towards our Community: open source availability, open access to the code under development, open documentation and effective project infrastructure. We are also committed to honor other people's rights by providing proper attribution to any contribution and respecting other people's intellectual property; at the same time, we are ready to defend our Community's investment into the project through legal means if necessary.

We believe that publishing this Manisfesto is very important step ahead, since Openbravo S.L is currently the main sponsor of Openbravo projects. Additionally, we are proud of being the first company of our category that makes a public statement about its commitments to his Community. This underscores our belief that, from the very first day, our Community has been and will continue to be the key to success for the Openbravo projects.

Hello everyone. I just want to ask you to give a warm welcome to Gil Forcada. He has joined the community departament at Openbravo. He will help doing Wiki editing tasks, answering forums questions, doing administrative tasks and collecting our community statistics. Gil speaks English, Spanish and Catalan.

Gil has been a contributor to the GNOME project for a few years, helping on the Catalan localization effort and helping on organizing GUADEC, the GNOME community annual European meeting. On top of that, Gil has been a founder and very active member of guifi, an open and free wireless network focus on Catalonia with more than 4.000 access points. All the infrastructure has been based on Linux and other open source solutions.

If you attend to our next Get Together in Barcelona this weekend, you will have the opportunity to meet him personally.

Last week I was unfortunate enough to travel through London on the next day of the opening of the now infamous Heathrow Terminal 5 and my two bags were among the 15,000 pieces of luggage that got lost in those days. Luckily both of them were eventually recovered and arrived safely home, even if 3 days later than expected.

This experience reminded me of how difficult it is to launch a new complex system. In that respect Openbravo ERP 2.40 is no different and it is also experiencing some delays. We were hoping to freeze our code today, but we had to extend that milestone by two weeks, one of which we hope to recover later on because we now have an automated way of building the installer and we can generate one much faster.
So here is our new schedule:

• Code freeze: April 18th
  
• Installer ready and beginning of Acceptance Testing: Apr 21st
• Acceptance Testing complete and alpha availability: Apr 28th
• Beginning of beta: May 30th
• Production: June 30th

I would like to take this opportunity to clarify a bit the purpose and mechanics of the alpha cycle. The goal of this phase is to allow the community to evaluate the new release and help us stabilize it. Since it is not intended for production purposes, we will only support fresh test installation and we do not intend to publish an upgrade path to 2.40 alpha nor one that will allow to upgrade to a production version.

Additionally, during the alpha cycle, the engineering team will be focused on fixing bugs, both backlog bugs from previous releases and new issues reported during the alpha testing itself. Because of that, it is likely that we will release various versions of the alpha release (alpha1, alpha2, etc.), each incorporating an increasing number of bug fixes.
We haven't decided the frequency of these updates and we intend to take that pragmatically, balancing two different priorities: avoid the need for people to refresh their testing environment and allowing them to work on the most stable code available.

Finally, in preparation to this release cycle we will create a new forum dedicated to questions and comments on this new release. We think we will call it Early Release Discussions but we haven't finalized the name yet.
The rationale for a separate forum is to keep separate as much as possible the production version from this early release to minimize the impact on the production users.

Hello everyone,

Within the last few days new positions have been opened at Openbravo in several departments, namely our Sales & Business Development, Product Development, Professional Services, Consulting and Community Divisions in both our Pamplona and Barcelona offices. The company is also planning to expand overseas soon.

We are now looking for bright minds to join our team and to help build on our success… if you are ready for a challenging and highly rewarding experience in an international setting, then you should have a look at the list of openings in our Openbravo Employment Channel section.

We specially value people from the Openbravo community that has experience installing, configuring, customizing or developing on Openbravo ERP platform and for those of you who have engineering background (or related disciplines), with strong development and/or management experience.

Openbravo offers a complete HR plan within a rapidly growing technology company, with huge potential for professional development, a competitive compensation system which includes great benefits. Also, working for Openbravo means working in a dynamic and young environment, with flexible working conditions, which foster innovation and creativity.

Given our rapid growth, we have plans to keep hiring on a regular basis during the year. I recommend for those interested to keep checking the Openbravo Employment Channel page for new openings.

If Openbravo sounds like the place for you, don’t hesitate to contact us at careers@openbravo.com

We are looking forward to hearing from you!

Today, 2nd of April 14.00 GMT, we had our third 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 35 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

Paolo Juvara explained what is the current status of the Openbravo ERP 2.40, building on his previous public comments, and highlighted some of the most significant features Openbravo Core:

1. Keyboard operation: his project not only provides shortcuts for all the functions in the system and allows its mouse-less operations; it also allows you to configure the default first field where the focus is placed when you navigate to a new record. We believe this will significantly reduce the number of clicks required to perform data entry.
2. UI feedback: this project will provide visual clues to the state of the system (record in edit mode, record in read only mode, processing, loading data, etc.).
3. Requisitions: this project significantly improves the Procurement footprint of Openbravo and enables enterprises to automate the buying process,from expression of demand to PO authoring. The Procurement flow is further improved with another small project that allows to simplify the receiving process by allow people to receive by PO number.
4. Multi-schema accounting: this capability allows you to account a single transaction multiple times, according to different account schemas.
   

In practice, this enables operating multi-national organizations with Openbravo where different organizations need to report to the local legal authorities plus the parent company.

Adrian Romero also commented on the future plans for Openbravo POS that are already on our roadmap, including, a new customer module with costumer and warehouse integration, support for skins and enhancements in the localization area.

We aim to schedule the next chat during May 2008. We will keep you posted.

As many of you already know, we are having bimonthly community meetings. The objective is to 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: 2nd of April 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. If you are not familiar with the chats, we have a Wiki page that explains how to setup the software and get connected.

When the 451 group blogged about Openbravo Network last October, they marked it as a relevant example of open source aiming to enter "markets that were previously seen as locked-down by dominant vendors." They also noted a gap in "the mid-market space [that] has been under-served by the industry giants that dominate the ERP space." This first point reminded me of my friend who said he did not know anything about "open source" then opened his Mozilla browser to look it up.

But the second point reminded me of the question being asked with open source solutions: how can we market our solution to end users accustomed to proprietary software? With Openbravo Network, we are attempting to answer this question by offering an optimized solution customizable to their needs, charging a reasonable price, and we then package it with peace of mind.

In 2005, Networkworld discussed key success factors for software appliances. Looking at these criteria, Openbravo Network covers every single area:

• Pricing: Pay as you go leasing
• Modular Design: Pick and choosing desired functionalities.
• Using Standards: Support well accepted standards that are easy to deploy, without needs to integrate required stack.
• Easy Management: Updates, remote repairs, self managed by internal system administrator or partner.
• Security: Build on "a hardened operating system and application stack that supports only the features and functions necessary for the appliance."
  

But whether because we are an open source project, or the above list was not meant for them, it is useful to think about what else the end user will be looking for. In addition to a reasonable price, the needs and pitch must run a bit differently.

1. Achieve Optimal Performance: Access to customize the solution and modules to specific needs. As well the solution is installed to work fastest, right out of the box, no testing required.
2. Maintain Optimal Performance: Quality control verified by Openbravo, with updates and monitoring available
3. Warranties and Certifications: The entire solution is backed by Openbravo (stack and ERP) and 1 month "fit for purpose" warranty
4. Technical Support: Question and improvements can be handled directly by Openbravo, either on site or remotely
5. Product Ownership: Product is owned upon purchase. Should users discontinue subscription, the system administration console and ERP is still owned forever. The support is pay as you go, not the solution.

For a developer or partner who can invest time, Openbravo ERP Community Edition comes with exactly the same functionalities as the ERP Network Edition. For the enterprise and partner with the ability to invest money, Network Edition = ERP Community Edition and more - an optimized solution, guaranteed, and with the best available support - they will also be receiving peace of mind.

The thinking behind Openbravo Network will allow the solution to succeed in the same way Mozilla did, because my buddy looks at it as a great solution, open source or not. People will like this product...and I think another slightly larger ERP company did too. Right before CeBIT Hannover 2008, they launched their own software appliance. Maybe they are proving that there may be room in the software appliance ERP world for large unflexible solutions from once dominant players after all?

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.

On March 25th and 26th, I will be attending InfoWorld's Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco.
This year's theme for the conference is Putting Open Source to Work and I look forward to mingling with some of the best people in the industry to learn their perspective on the topic. The agenda is packed with very interesting keynotes and debates and it is going to be difficult to choose what to attend!

On the first day of the conference, I have been invited to participating to a panel discussion titled The Community Imperative: Building and Leveraging Community into IT. This is a topic that is very dear to me and to all of us at Openbravo as we are aware that our project's success largely depends on our Community.
From the very beginning we put a lot of effort in building a vibrant Community and we learned a lot in the process. This panel is going to be a great opportunity to compare notes with not only representatives of other great open source projects but also other Community members such as system integrators and end users.

I know several people that are thinking about the option of starting up a new company to develop an ERP business practice. My suggestion to them would be, not considering some minor exceptions, to definitely think twice before partnering with a proprietary vendor. The CeBIT is over. It was an exhaustive and intense 6-day fair. As expected, we took back home several different memories with us. However, there is one which I would somehow call “surprising”: at the stand for one of the top proprietary ERP vendors I saw two sales representatives “fighting” each other and discussing about who should be the one to talk to the end-client even before listening to the end-client needs. Obviously, each sales representative was defending a different solution. Next to them, some other partners were fiercely competing with peers to attract the attention of end-clients passing by with the main goal of being elected as one of the four or five parties that would probably meet each other in the next phases of the evaluation.

I perfectly “understand” why do IT consultancy companies stay “loyal” to their proprietary vendors: they are making a lot of revenues thanks to the licenses end-clients are paying to be eligible to use vendor’s software! However, they usually struggle when trying to make their practice grow year-over-year or trying to get more than just a 5% profit margin. Why not considering an alternative or a compliment that would easily help them to skyrocket their revenues and margins? Professional and competitive Open Source ERP solutions are already a reality that cannot be denied, but there is still an incomprehensible fear and reluctance to adopt these. I am amazed to see that most partners of proprietary vendors still prefer to swim in a red ocean infested of sharks rather than to explore new virgin and risk-free seas. Should not the second option be far more attractive than the first one? Just a thought…

Géza Nagy has completed the chart of accounts for Hungary for Openbravo R2.35.

The chart of accounts can be downloaded from the "openbravo-accounting" Openbravo download section at SourceForge: (0 comments)

Lluis Llavina (Channel Management Director), Ivo Oltman (Channel Manager), Vanessa O'Bree (Marketing and Communications Assistant), and I are currently at the CeBIT from March 4 - 9. We are meeting potential system integrators, end clients, and companies with joint interests in collaboration. To this point, the week has been marked by attempting to meet two central themes: answering questions from knowledgeable attendees and meeting the demands of "higher-than-ever" interest.

As with our previous fairs, a vast number of people come to our booth each day potentially knowing the name Openbravo. However, I've been particularly intrigued by the amount of people at this fair who had planned to visit us and arrived with a specific list of questions. Related to the ERP, whereas in the past, we've used quick demos to give people a flavor of the product, many people see demos and interact with us having downloaded the product, having read the wiki, or having at least seen the website. While demos usually run less than 4 minutes, at least 5-7 each day have gone 10 - 15 minutes. In most of these cases, our wiki documentation is used to help guide attendees to specific answers.

Product demos are just one small part of the process, and interest has been gauged in other areas. We've seen how Ivo can build confidence with potential partners talking about the value proposition and Openbravo Network. Yesterday, Vanessa ran out to print out more brochures as our 1500 sheet supply is running short after only 3 days. And on Saturday Lluis will spend 9 hours having over 20 interviews with media/meeting with potential partners. We feel the interest is high, and are looking forward to the collaborations that come about because of this interest.

Until now at these fairs, people seemed to check up on the stability and quality of our product, leading them to ask and take note of the executive team behind Openbravo. During this fair I also noticed the following comments specifically related to certain product areas:

• Having three types of production and a true POS offer makes system integrators see more potential market.
• Product speed is faster than expected for a web server, and doesn't show much different compared against clients.
• The Ajax technology is easily noticeable where used
• Through Field Links (in blue) and the Linked Items feature, people enjoying the free flowing movement.

What's needed, based on seeing the product demo:

• Meeting people from Bulgaria, Malaysia, Nigeria, etc., localization was the major request
• Integration with other complementary solutions like CRM, web stores, and other solutions.
• A favorites menu would be fun so people can leave their commonly used windows in one place. For now, being able to drag and drop the menu is enough of a work around.

Things are going extremely well here, and it's a fun challenge to trying to maintain the rhythm meeting attendees over 6 days, 9 hours each day. It's obvious we're enjoying the how things are going, and looking forward to attacking the weekend.

These days, the Openbravo Development team is working very hard to finalize the 2.40 release and I think it is time to start sharing some news with our Community.

Openbravo ERP 2.40 will be a landmark release from many points of view.

In terms of functionality it introduces many cool capabilities that our users have been asking for. Just to mention some highlights:

• Industry Template: this feature will provide the ability to package additional modules (functional extensions) and pre-defined configuration in order to dramatically reduce the implementation costs and time by providing a one-button delivery of everything that is needed to operate Openbravo ERP in a given industry.
• Keyboard Operations: this feature will increase users' productivity by allowing them to operate all the essential functions of the product with the keyboard.
• Revised Security: this project streamlines the security setup and makes it easier and faster to configure the system in organizations with demanding data segregation requirements.
• Requisitions: with this feature, Openbravo completes the support for the procurement processes by cleanly separating the roles of a requestor of goods and services from the role of the purchasing manager who creates the POs.
• Multi-schema accounting: ability to account transactions according to multiple accounting rules and currencies.
• Additional reports
• Much more

For the first time, with this release, you can follow our progress and have a sneak preview of what we are doing. Each project comes with a functional specification that describes what it is about and the progress of the whole release is summarized in a status page, publicly available on the Wiki.
From that page, you can:

• View the status of each project.
• Access the project documentation.
• See if the project has been completed and merged in the trunk, in which case you can start using the feature by connecting to our SVN server and building from sources.

In 2.40 we will also put a lot of emphasis on quality and on cleaning up the defect backlog that we have accumulated over the years (you know, all those small defects... many of them are not that critical and you are often tempted to defer them, but when you put them all together...).
To give you visibility into this process, we have started publishing bug projections where, on a weekly basis, we estimate the inflow and outflow of bugs and we compare the actuals with estimates.
Just a disclaimer on this (I owe it to the team who very bravely published these projections): our estimates might not be very reliable at the beginning but we are confident that they will improve over time; we hope you will appreciate our efforts to continue giving you our honest best guess of what the future backlog will be like; please do not criticize us too much if things do not evolve as planned.

As this point, you might be asking the tough question... when will 2.40 be available? Well... if you are a developer you can follow up as we go and get hold of our daily build now from our SVN servers.
If you prefer to wait for the official installers, here is the schedule as we see it today:

• April 4th 2008: Internal code freeze - all features are completed and tested in their own branch and all branches have been merged with the trunk.
• April 11th 2008: Installer available and beginning of Acceptance Testing. The purpose of Acceptance Testing is to validate that the release installs successfully in Windows and Linux (our two most popular platforms), works properly against Oracle and PostgreSQL, and that none of the major flows is dead on arrival. We intend to involve the Community in this test but we would like to keep it small and we will probably follow the same process that we used for 2.35 and 2.35 MP1.
• April 19th 2008: Acceptance Testing complete and 2.40 Alpha publicly available for download on SourceForge. The purpose of the Alpha cycle is to let the Community evaluate the release and give us feedback on quality and overall readiness. As such, 2.40 at that point we will not recommend 2.40 for production usage and we will continue to position 2.35 as our latest production release.
  As you can see from our bug projections, we plan to be very busy fixing defects during the Alpha cycle and we hope that we will be able to eliminate most of our backlog by then.
  
• May: end of the Alpha cycle and begin of the Beta cycle. During this phase, we will aim at deploying 2.40 in production at a limited number of customers with the purpose of validating that the release is successful in live environments. Again, during this time, 2.35 will remain our latest production release.
• June: 2.40 will finally become production and replace 2.35. Big celebration.

That's our plan for the next four months. We will keep you updated if anything changes.

Last week Openbravo released the first version of Openbravo POS under its new name. You can read all the details of the new version in the press release published.

We are very happy with this release and we achieved all the objectives expected. We included nice features like having the localization files in an external folder to allow to add new localizations as a plug-in without having to recompile, new Substance look and feel themes, etc. We also fixed most of the bugs reported in the Sourceforge project pages. You can read the full release notes in the Openbravo wiki. We are also very grateful for the response of the community to this new release. Today Openbravo POS is one of the top 25th projects in Sourceforge and we expect to stay there for a long time. This is something that gives us a lot of energy to continue working hard.

Now we are working in the roadmap for the next release. This roadmap will be published in the wiki pages as soon as it is finished. In the next release we plan to continue with the same objectives and focus in the localization issues of Openbravo POS, to complement Openbravo ERP and to include new features and stability to Openbravo POS. In one sentence, to give to our partners and our community a competitive product in the Point of Sale software arena and, in association with Openbravo ERP, the best open source software suite for SME.

“Why don’t you write about Channel Development?”, asked me the other day our CEO. “I probably should”, I thought. It was not the first time someone had asked me the very same question. Some potential partners, community members and other software vendors had done so in the past. They were wondering why such an interesting topic was missing in Openbravo planet. The reason: I just simply did not have enough quality time to talk/write about it (you know, time constraints related to any start-up).

I personally joined Openbravo back in December 2006 to lead partner network expansion throughout the world. At that stage, we just had a few “friendly partners”. There was no partner program but a “friendly pack” offer only. Then, the purpose was to make sure that both Openbravo ERP as well as some of the professional services we had thought of were ready for the partners to be able to develop a successful business practice around our solution.

Today, our partner network is constituted by more than 65 partners covering more than 50 countries, and growing. We have a unique 100% quality based partner program in place (which by the way, is about to be revamped and significantly improved) and a professional edition - Openbravo Network is its name - which should significantly help everyone in the business to scale revenues and build a very profitable business practice while providing a much more attractive value proposition to end-clients (e.g. providing bug fixing guarantees around the leading web-based Open Source ERP solution).

And last but not least, team now is larger (and much more international by the way), which provides me with enough confidence so we (not only I but all the team) can launch this new initiative: “Channel Development: experiences and thoughts” blog. It is not only going to be about Channel Development but also about our Partner Network, one of the most important assets that any company in the space might have... along with the product and people of course.

After an interesting experience with the Wikipedia, Openbravo is finally included in the Internet's encyclopedia for good. We have learned about obscure terms (at least for the uninitiated) such as "unsalt", "WP:COI", "WP:NN" "WP:AFDP".

It is clear that these complex rules have generated an extraordinarily amazing pool of high-quality content. Not an easy task to be achieved by a group of volunteers.

However, after this experience, I would like to suggest Wikipedia to include some beginner manuals or HOWTO guides. To name a few: How can you include your company on the Wikipedia? Do's and don't for a casual contributor; How to dispute/reverse an unfair decision?.

I also think there are some take aways for Openbravo as a community. When you are immersed in the dynamics of the community, you can forget there are beginners who are trying to make sense of it. Some of these will become the core members of the future, and you can not alienate them or they will never participate in the game. Building a successful community is about ensuring there is something in it for everyone, regardless of the level of skills or knowdledge they have.

Please, let us know if we are not doing so!

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:

• 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.
  

This is the direction that we are working and we hope that it would happen during 2008. We are focusing first on the new bug tracking system and Wiki and then in the rest of the services. We ask you please to be patient. Any feedback on these plans this is really appreciated.

Anyone willing to provide additional services or resources to help to build our community is more than welcome.

Openbravo is going to launch Openbravo POS 2.00 in few days. This is the first version of Openbravo POS under its new name and we are asking the community to help us validate its quality before release.

If you are willing and able this opportunity is for you! Notify us of your interest by sending an email to collaborate at openbravo dot com.

The process is going to be very similar to what we do for Openbravo ERP and the process we will follow is the same we used for Openbravo ERP R2.35. Specifically, here is what we are asking:

1. We will give you early access to the installer through a private FTP server. You will essentially receive the release at the same time as our QA team.
2. We will give you access to our QA portal, where you can see our test cases for the acceptance test. Please note this will be the first acceptance test for Openbravo POS.
   
3. We will assign you a set of test cases and we expect that you will install the application on your machine, run the test cases and report the outcome in the QA portal
   
4. We will not assign you any bug to verify as we will execute that task internally. Obviously you are free to verify specific bugs that you care about.
5. If you have any questions or doubts during the process, please contact at pablo dot sarobe at openbravo dot com (QA Team).
   

Acceptance testing should start on February, 18th and ideally should last 3 or 4 days.

Please remember that this is going to be an Acceptance Testing, not a full blown QA cycle. The purpose of Acceptance Testing is to validate that an already QA'ed release is good to go and that the last build didn't introduce any major regression (essentially: test the product as it is going to be shipped before your users do to avoid to be embarrassed later).

Because of that, we will stop the release only if one of the test cases fails with a significant bug. Nonetheless, we do expect you to log all issues you find, including small bugs, as we will fix those in future releases.

Openbravo POS 2.00 is the starting point of a product that we are investing a lot of effort to offer this great portfolio of open source applications for SME. There are important features included and a large list of bugs fixed. We look forward to your participation!

Last week, Openbravo POS has been officially launched as a new member of the Openbravo products family. It has its own product page at http://www.openbravo.com/product/pos/ and the name migration from Librepos is complete. That comes with a new project page in Sourceforge http://sourceforge.net/projects/openbravopos/ and a redirection from the older project pages. I expect that the old members of the Librepos community will not get lost and start working in the new project pages as soon as possible.

Also, I want to remind to the Openbravo community that we have great plans for Openbravo POS and we are working to execute them. The first step is to release the first version under its new name in mid February. Check the road map at http://wiki.openbravo.com/wiki/index.php/Openbravo_POS_roadmap. And a training course will be held in Barcelona in april, in English and Spanish.

First my apologies to all the readers for not having posted any messages since quite a long time already. My only, hopefully valid, excuse is the enormous workload we had to close the year 2007. Now, what can I say that has not been said by other bloggers, analysts and press in the last days?. Three short comments that have attracted my attention over this period:

1. I think we all will agree by now that Open Source has consolidated as one of the most important forces that today is changing the software industry. Just look at some of the transactions that the industry has had in the last weeks ranging from Zimbra, Xensource, MySQL or Trolltech. By the way … isn't it strange that with the latest news of Microsoft bidding to acquire Yahoo, Zimbra could become part of Microsoft? I am curious to see what will the implications would be.
2. Further, the initially successful Netsuite IPO has brought even more attention than there already was into our space: the world of ERPs. Specially proving that there is a huge opportunity for the company or companies that are able to deliver something new and compelling to midmarket companies.
3. Openbravo has had a marvelous 2007!. I would suggest that all of you read the round up press release that we just published today. We are proving that there is a better and more efficient model to satisfy the hundreds of thousands of traditionally under-served small and mid-sized companies around the globe.
   

2008 looks incredibly promising for Openbravo. I have no doubts that with our product, community and hard and good work we will continue to advance very rapidly. Bear with us my friends!

By the way, do you know that we have been presented with yet another award, this time in the Open Source Meets Business Conference?

Openbravo community has completed the translation to French and the chart of accounts for France for Openbravo R2.3x.

The files can be downloaded from the Openbravo download area at SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=162271 (2 comments)

Hello everybody,

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.
  

That's all for now. If you have any news regarding Openbravo success or efforts, please let me know (jmas at openbravo.com)

This is a question that many community members and partners have in mind without a clear answer. Of course, you can find a short answer in our FAQ about product localization. But is this realistic?

The first point is to realize that localizing an ERP is an endless task, as is the development of the ERP itself. But we can say that we have a basic localization when you translate the interface and create a chart of accounts for your country. The standard answer is a month for translation and a week for the chart of accounts.

We have tested it this month, we wanted to finalize the localization for French for the Solutions Linux 2008 and we decided to take charge of it. There was a partial translation for a previous version of the product that was about three quarters of the total translation, so there was the need to finalize it and verify it.

To create the chart of accounts we started from scratch with the information available from the “Ministère de l'Économie, des finances et de l'emploi”.

We started at the beginning of this month and the files were available before the opening of Solutions Linux.

This required a person that knows French and is familiar with business terminology and a person that knows the basics of accounting behaviour. Both skills are essential to implementating the product. The language skill is obvious, but the knowledge of accounting is something that many consultants feel uncomfortable working with. The creation of the chart of accounts is a way to get this skill without the pressure of the customer.

Finally, what you need is a month of work to have the localization of your country and start your operation (of course with good experience with the product).

Openbravo is spreading over many countries. You can see the localization project list, the map of partners and the success stories.
This has been done thanks to our community, partners and the Openbravo team.

In the Get Together event we saw the interest of our community in the localization projects of Openbravo. We have a localization team focused on this task and, as a result, you can use Openbravo in many countries, in some cases thanks to a localization pack developed by Openbravo itself and in many others thanks to projects lead by the larger community.

We see this as a sign of success as our goal is to support a localization process lead by the community, as we believe that to be the most scalable way to achieve global coverage.

In this spirit, besides answering questions in the forums, we have made an effort in providing more documentation about the localization process itself and the task related to it, e.g. accounting tasks. In particular, we have released new documents that can help you developing a localization for your own region. You can see them in our wiki page, in the Localization section. Here you can find the documents that explain how to create new chart of accounts and test them, create customized reports about accounting and taxes or the behaviour of taxes in Openbravo.

Our experience with the localization process is that the creation of the chart of accounts is the more difficult for people, usually because it is hard to have the required dual competence in accounting and software development together.

We think there are two ways of approaching this, depending on whether your country has official laws about this or not. For example, in Spain the chart of accounts is defined by the government and you must use the accounts and reports defined there, without a lot of choices.

The opposite happens in countries like the USA where there are no firm guidelines and therefore you must define how to organize this information. In the cases of the U.S., we have made the choice of implementing the simplest chart of accounts following the guides of a well know U.S. financial institutions, i.e. the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. If your country does not have compulsory laws, you could take a similar approach and start by reviewing this document and even use a translation of the US chart of accounts as a starting point.

We are aware that there is a lot more to localization than just translation and chart of accounts. Openbravo is a very flexible platform and many deeper localization functionality can be easily developed in addition to accounting.

We keep improving the tools and documentation to make easier the localization process and we’re forward looking to hearing from you in the localization forums, even we delay some answers or we have difficulties answering some of your questions.

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.