Posts by Paolo Juvara:

An emotional review of Openbravo 3 history

May 2nd, 2011
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where, cleaning up a closet, you finding a box of old photos that you forgot even existed?


I must confess. I am a nostalgic and that is one of those situations where I am prone to overwhelming emotions. The memories start coming back and I start thinking of old friends, choices made and times gone by.


A couple of days ago, I had such an experience. I was answering a question on layout choices in the interface of Openbravo 3 and I started going back and look at the discussions in the UX forum labs.


Eventually, I found the original concept videos and image mockups that Rob Goris published in February 2009.


That's right February 2009, over 2 years ago!


The publication of Openbravo 3 in February this year represents a very significant step forward in the history of the project. The key element of the release is a complete rearchitecture of the user experience, centered around the concepts of user agility and the introduction of workspaces, multi-tabbed UIs, master detail layouts and editable grid.


The feedback that we are receiving from our users in overwhelmingly positive and enthusiastic.


This new release has been a long way coming and, now that it is finally here, it is at the same time interesting, fun and moving to go back and see how the concepts behind it started, were debated and evolved, improving over time since their original form, yet staying remarkably close to the original vision.


I have to take my hat off for all the members of the Openbravo development team and our community members who participated in the design process. Good job guys. Well done.

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Announcing Openbravo 3.0 RC6

April 22nd, 2011
I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of Openbravo 3.0 RC6, the fifth release candidate in the Openbravo 3 series.

Openbravo 3.0 RC6 is primarily a stabilization release, including over 130 fixes for issues reported by early adopters of previous release candidates.




Besides stabilization, Openbravo 3.0 RC6 also delivers some further productivity improvements that make the usage of the ERP easier and more agile:

• Redesigned Alert window: alerts are exceptions in your business processes (for examples, overdue invoices or late orders) that your Openbravo system automatically detects and prompts you to manage. With the new alert window, investigating the cause of the anomaly, correcting it or dismissing it is a breeze.
• Notes: notes is a new facility available on every document in the system that allows you to add textual annotations to your transactions. You can use this functionality to store unstructured information in your ERP. For instance, for example you can add a note to an overdue invoice to document the content of the conversation with your customers in which they promised to send a payment by next week; you can also use it to store a reminder that when you send a delivery truck to a particular customer, they need to call ahead of time so that the delivery gate can be open when the truck arrives.
Openbravo 3.0 RC6 is intended for production usage by early adopters and it is a fully supported release available in all editions, Community, Basic and Professional Edition.

If you are a new user interested in learning about Openbravo and evaluating the product, you should use Openbravo 3.0 RC6. If you are an existing community member interested in staying up to speed with the latest evolutions of Openbravo, you should download and install Openbravo 3.0 RC6.

If you are interested in deploying Openbravo for production usage in a new project, you should also consider Openbravo 3.0 RC6. Early adopters interested in deploying Openbravo 3.0 RC5 in production are recommended to thoroughly test the processes relevant to their business before deploying them in production.


If you are already in production on an earlier version of Openbravo 3, we advise you to update your system to RC6 at your earliest convenience. If you are in production on Openbravo 2.50 or earlier, we advise you to wait for general availability before scheduling an upgrade.

If you want to learn more about Openbravo 3.0 RC6, please review the release notes for a full description of the release, download instructions or Amazon EC2 AMI codes. If you are pressed for time and have only a few minutes to learn about the product, you can take it for a spin in our demo environment.


As always, you are encouraged to tell us what you think, by posting a comment on this post, raising an issue in issues.openbravo.comor discussing it in the Early Releases Discussion forum.


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Announcing Openbravo 3.0 RC5

March 22nd, 2011 I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of Openbravo 3.0 RC5, the fifth release candidate in the Openbravo 3 series.

Openbravo 3.0 RC5 is primarily a stabilization release, including over 140 fixes for issues reported by early adopters of previous release candidates.


With over 13,000 downloads since its launch, Openbravo 3.0 RC4 has been a fantastic success and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. We are thankful for the help and contributions received from our Community and we hope that RC5 will demonstrate Openbravo's continuous commitment to the rapid and incremental delivery of increasingly stable versions of Openbravo 3.


Besides stabilization, Openbravo 3.0 RC5 also delivers some further productivity improvements that make the usage of the ERP easier and more agile:
• Document links: you can now generate a URL that will give you direct access to a specific document. This widely requested features allows you to collaborate more easily around Openbravo documents by sharing references with other people in your organization. For example, a sales person can ask her manager to review a proposal by simply sending her an email with the direct link to the quotation.
  The URL is password protected and only people with the proper credentials can access documents this way.
• Recent documents: your most recently accessed document are now listed on your workspace for easy access. Now you can easily interrupt your work stream with the confidence that you will be able to resume it later, with just one click.
• Searches by date ranges: you can now search documents by date ranges either expressed as absolute values (i.e. from 15-FEB-2011 to 17-MAR-2011) or as relative ranges (i.e. the last 30 days).
• Improved keyboard shortcuts: a broader set of keyboard shortcuts are now available demonstrating Openbravo's commitment to both accessibility and productivity.
• Faster line entry in grid mode: you can now enter multiple lines more efficiently by either pressing ENTER, arrow down or tabbing through the last field of the grid.
Openbravo 3.0 RC5 is intended for production usage by early adopters and it is a fully supported release available in all editions, Community, Basic and Professional Edition.

If you are a new user interested in learning about Openbravo and evaluating the product, you should use Openbravo 3.0 RC5. If you are an existing community member interested in staying up to speed with the latest evolutions of Openbravo, you should download and install Openbravo 3.0 RC5.

If you are interested in deploying Openbravo for production usage in a new project, you should also consider Openbravo 3.0 RC5. Early adopters interested in deploying Openbravo 3.0 RC5 in production are recommended to thoroughly test the processes relevant to their business before deploying them in production.


If you are already in production on an earlier version of Openbravo 3, we advise you to update your system to RC5 at your earliest convenience. If you are in production on Openbravo 2.50 or earlier, we advise you to wait for general availability before scheduling an upgrade.

If you want to learn more about Openbravo 3.0 RC5, please review the release notes for a full description of the release, download instructions or Amazon EC2 AMI codes. If you are pressed for time and have only a few minutes to learn about the product, you can take it for a spin in our demo environment.

As always, you are encouraged to tell us what you think, by posting a comment on this post, raising an issue in issues.openbravo.comor discussing it in the Early Releases Discussion forum.

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A Prince of Asturias Award for the International Open Source Community

March 11th, 2011
The Prince of Asturias Awards are a series of annual prizes awarded in Oviedo, Spain by the Prince of Asturias Foundation to individuals, entities or organizations from around the world who make notable achievements in several categories, ranges from Art, to Literature, Sport, Technical and Scientific Research, and Concord.

This year, the Prince of Asturias Foundation - the organization awarding the prizes - has invited CENATIC (Centro Nacional de Referencia de Aplicación de las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación) to propose a candidate for receiving the award in the International Cooperation category.

After having evaluated various options, CENATIC decided to candidate the International Open Source Community, defined as all persons and institutions around the world who contribute to free software through a collaborative, open model based on freedom, knowledge sharing, collaboration, meritocracy, and respect for copyright, with actions such as developing , outreach, advocacy, documentation, evidence, organization, marketing support and free software.

Past recipient of the award in this prestigious category include:

• 2010: The Transplantation Society and the National Transplant Organization
• 2007: Al Gore
• 2006: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
• 2001: The International Space Station
• 1994: Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin
• 1993: United Nations Blue Berets stationed in Ex-Yugoslavia
• 1992: Nelson Mandela and Fredrik Willelm de Klerk
• and many others.
  
Openbravo as an organization and myself as an individual support this candidature recognizing that the International Open Source Community has been an engine of technological innovation and economic growth; in addition, open source has allowed the spread of knowledge around the world, eliminating economical, social, cultural, geographic and language barriers and ensuring the free and unfeathered access to technology for all.

Today I invite all members of the Openbravo Community to support this candidature by:

1. Endorsing it on the CENATIC site: http://www.cenatic.es/swlppa
2. Spreading the word through social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)
3. Inviting your contacts to support this candidature.
   
As proud members of the International Open Source Community, Openbravo as an organization and myself as an individual feel honored to make our small contribution to larger open source movement. We are also moved and humbled to see open source recognized as one of the great achievements of humanity.

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Announcing Openbravo 3.0 RC4

February 23rd, 2011
I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of Openbravo 3.0 RC4, the fourth release candidate in the Openbravo 3 series.

Openbravo 3.0 RC4 is a particularly important milestone as it is feature complete, delivering the new implementation of AD windows, and achieving the full user experience of Openbravo 3.

With RC4, Openbravo 3 delivers on our vision of Agile ERP, with a solution that provides:
• The highest productivity: easy to adopt and use, with a powerful user interface, and fully integrated.
• Complete business agility: functionally comprehensive, easily extensible with a modular approach, and fully upgradeable.
• Sustained ROI: cost effective to be deployed to the extended organization, providing universal accessibility through its web-based interface, and leaving users in control thanks to its open source license.
Future release candidates will be focused on minor enhancements, stabilization and incorporating the feedback received by early adopters.

Openbravo 3.0 RC4 is intended for production usage by early adopters and it is a fully supported release available in all editions, Community, Basic and Professional Edition.

If you are a new user interested in learning about Openbravo and evaluating the product, you should use Openbravo 3.0 RC4. If you are an existing community member interested in staying up to speed with the latest evolutions of Openbravo, you should download and install Openbravo 3.0 RC4.

If you are interested in deploying Openbravo for production usage in a new project, you should also consider Openbravo 3.0 RC4. Early adopters interested in deploying Openbravo 3.0 RC4 in production are recommended to thoroughly test the processes relevant to their business before deploying them in production.

If you want to learn more about Openbravo 3.0 RC4, please review the release notes for a full description of the release, download instructions or Amazon EC2 AMI codes. If you are pressed for time and have only a few minutes to learn about the product, you can take it for a spin in our demo environment.

As always, you are encouraged to tell us what you think, by posting a comment on this post, raising an issue in issues.openbravo.com or discussing it in the Early Releases Discussion forum.

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Test drive a preview of Openbravo 3 and experience what people are raving about

January 29th, 2011 The past few hours have seen an increased Twitter activity on people giving favorable reviews of the new user experience of Openbravo 3.

The new product, with the new user interface, will become available to the overall community in our next release candidate, Openbravo 3.0 RC4, due for release in a few days. The code for this release is publicly available in our source control repository and it is very close to completion; a few members of our community have already been able to test it and are sharing their feedback in the social media.

This is great! And, in fact, we would love to get even more people trying the new product out and giving us feedback.

If you want to check it out and experience first hand what people are raving about, you do not need to be a developer, knowledgeable about code builds, or able to mess with source code repositories.

There is a simple trick to get local access to our latest build without having to leave the comfort of your browser interface. Just follow these simple steps:

1. Start by downloading an Openbravo 3.0 RC3 appliance.
2. Login as System Administrator and navigate to the Module Management window (General Setup -> Application -> Module Management)
3. In the Settings tab, specify that you will accept modules in maturity level "Test" for both scan for update and new module installation actions. The image below shows the relevant fields highlighted in red.Now your system is ready to be updated to our latest version under development.
4. Return to the Installed Modules tab in that same window and press the Scan for Updates button.
5. From here follow the normal update process, starting by clicking on the Install Updates Now, completing the installation of the new version and continuing with a system rebuild and a mid-tier restart.
6. Once you are done, you will be able to login in a preview version of Openbravo 3 and start experiencing the new user interface.
NOTE: at this stage, the client is very demanding on browser resources and we have not completed its optimization yet. Your system will be faster if you use either Firefox 4, Internet Explorer 9 or Chrome.

Keep in mind that this is a preview version, straight out of the tip of the code repository and that it has not gone through QA. You are likely to find instabilities and you should not use it for production purposes.
However, the system is certainly quite stable and it should be more than enough for you to get a sense of the great things that are coming very soon.

Spend some time playing with this product. I highly recommend it and I am sure that you will enjoy it as much as we do. Your feedback is important for us, so please do not forget to drop a line in the Early Releases Discussion forum letting us know what you think.

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Track Santa’s progress in your Openbravo workspace

December 24th, 2010 Who said that ERP has to be boring?

With the new workspace and widget capabilities of Openbravo 3.0 you can include all types of content directly in your ERP.

One of my favorite sites for the Holiday Season is the Official NORAD Santa Tracker, that allows children and adults alike to follow Santa's progress with his delivery work. This year, NORAD added a Google widget for the site.

With that and following Rob's tutorial, you can easily add your Santa tracker to your ERP workspace and monitor Santa's deliveries as you monitor your own warehouse shipments.

I wish a Happy Holiday Season to everybody!

P.S.: To people in Spain - sorry, I am not aware of a Reyes Magos tracker yet.

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The Amazing Openbravo 3.0 Grid

December 16th, 2010 Two weeks have gone by since the launch of Openbravo 3.0 RC3, which - with its My Openbravo workspace and support for widgets - was very well received and has already been downloaded more than 4000 times.

Since then, the Openbravo development team has been hard at work on 3.0 RC4, targeted for late January and introducing some of the most significant changes of the 3.0 release: master detail and editable grid.

While you will need to wait a few more weeks to download a packaged version that allows you to test driving these new capabilities, the functionality is already code complete and working in the developers' machines.

We know that you have been expecting these features for a long time, so we didn't want to keep you waiting any longer and we recorded a video that show them in action.



The video is taken out of a development environment and it is quite crude. Yet, it is enough to make you understand what is coming and I am confident you will get as excited as we are about these new amazing user interface.

Let me walk you through it.

The video starts in the Sales Order window that illustrates the new master detail paradigm where you can see the full sales order documents in a single view, without having to navigate to several tabs. At second 4 you can see how the splitter that separates master from detail records can be easily moved allowing you to adjust the dimension of your work space to the data you need to work with: if you are working on multiple sales order headers, you can expand the top part of the screen; when you focus on a single order, you can increase the size of the bottom part of the screen to make sure that all the order lines properly fit.

The video then moves to the Account Tree window that, again, is an example of the master (the chart of accounts) detail (the accounts) pattern. Notice at second 9 how the child tab is immediately populated when a master record is selected and the tab shows the number of records it contains - 1352 in this case - next to its title. This allows you to assess the content of a tab without the need to open it and therefore saving you several clicks while exploring data.

From second 15 to 30, notice the responsiveness of the grid and how easy it is to scroll through it, even when it contains a large number of records. Isn't that great?

Second 35 to minute 1:00 illustrate how you can now not only resize columns - like in 2.50 - but also reposition them in the grid and hide or show them. The best part is that users can define and save their preferred grid configuration so they do not need to repeat it every time they access the window.

From minute 1:00 to 1:45, you can see how filters work and how users can enjoy in the ERP the same power and intuitiveness that they are used while analyzing data using a spreadsheet. Many applications highlight their capability to export data to a spreadsheet for analysis; Openbravo not only does that but it also brings the power of a spreadsheet directly within the application, eliminating the need to export.

The ease of use and productivity of a spreadsheet are also emulated in the edit capabilities, starting from second 1:45. Here you can see how a user can quickly make changes to several records by just moving to the next line, very much in the same way they would do it in a spreadsheet.

At minute 2:20, the demo shows how this type of grid editing can also be used to trigger actions like, for example, changing the status of an order, directly from the grid. Again, this saves several clicks and makes users much more productive.

Finally, from minute 2:45, you can see one of the most powerful features of the grid which allows users to add calculated fields based on the content of other columns. This capability provides a very simple but powerful reporting tool allowing users to fully exploit the data in their ERP to drive decisions in their business.

These combined capabilities transform the way users interact with the system, making Openbravo a productivity tool that not only allows you to record and process transactions in your organization without getting in the way but also to manipulate and extract the full power of the information in your ERP.

All of these features will become available shortly and I hope that you will be as excited as we are with this amazing new grid, coming to an Openbravo implementation near you in just a few weeks.

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Stepping into the CEO role

December 9th, 2010 About a week ago, Openbravo announced my appointment to the role of Chief Executive Officer of the company.

Since the announcement, I have received an enormous amount of congratulatory messages from not only colleagues and partners but from members of our Community as well.
I would like to thank everybody for their wishes and their support.

I step into this new capacity after nearly four years as Openbravo CTO. This new role extends my responsibilities beyond product definition and coordination of community activities and into the management of the overall business around the Openbravo product.

These past years have seen the Openbravo Community reach many significant milestones, including passing the 1.8 million product downloads mark, the registration of more than 12,000 developers in the Openbravo Forge, and the publication of 250 extension modules.

Today, thousands of organizations around the world run their business with the Openbravo free and open source ERP solution.

I credit a good part of this success to the open collaboration and communication process that Openbravo has established with its community, including:

• Public road map.
• Open engagement on the direction of the product.
• Full visibility of the progress of its development process.
• Open dialog on the design of upcoming features.
  
• Public source code viewing at http://code.openbravo.com.
• Open documentation with a wiki that contains more than 3,000 articles, with 1,300 monthly edits, and servers around 35,000 unique monthly visitors.
  
• A public issue tracker at http://issues.openbravo.com where any community member can view or report issues
  
• Community support not only through forums but also through the #openbravo IRC channel on freenode.net.
• Community education with frequent public webinars.
  
• Open community meetings.
  
• A public collaboration space with the Openbravo Forge.
• And much more...
This open community engagement will continue and accelerate in the coming months under the leadership of Ismael Ciordia, one of original founders of Openbravo, who - after having spent the last few years focused on the technology of the Openbravo platform - will now step back in his original role of CTO.

On the commercial side, Openbravo will also continue on its established path of defining and executing a sustainable and fair business model that does not divorce open source from professional usage.

One of Openbravo's core values is the belief that no ERP can be successful without a vibrant channel of service providers adding their domain expertise and geographic proximity to the customers. Openbravo is and will continue to be 100% committed to the business success of its partners.

Thanks to this approach, Openbravo Professional Edition continues to show an impressive momentum and we have more than doubled our subscription sales in just the first three quarters of the year.

In the coming months we will continue to provide tools and facilities to our partners to make their Openbravo business practice more effective and to accelerate the dissemination of Openbravo Professional Edition even further.

I am honored and excited to take over the CEO role for Openbravo at this time of expansion.
I am also thankful to every person in the Openbravo Community for their continued support.

Your contribution is the most essential element of Openbravo's success.

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Announcing Openbravo 3.0 RC3

November 29th, 2010 I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of Openbravo 3.0 RC3, the third release candidate in the 3.0 series.

Release candidates are incremental deliveries towards the full 3.0 road map and do not contain the full set of functionality intended for 3.0.



The RC3 milestone contains some exciting new capabilities delivering a completely new experience for Openbravo users. In particular, Openbravo 3.0 RC3 introduces the amazing My Openbravo workspace that provide a portal-like dashboard to Openbravo users.
Using this new feature, users can easily integrate at UI level their Openbravo installation with any other web application, either on their organization intranet or in the public Internet.
For example you can:

• Integrate with your corporate CRM system and add a chart showing your sales pipeline for the rest of the year;
• Integrate with your organization's web calendar to see all of your appointment for the day;
• Integrate with Facebook and Twitter to always be up to date of what people are saying about your company or to update your colleagues on what you are woking on today.
  
These are only some examples. With My Openbravo, the sky is the limit and you can make Openbravo your primary workspace from which you can start all of your work activities, either in the ERP or in other systems.

My Openbravo renders information in widgets. System administrators can easily configure the default widgets displayed for all users in the system; they can also provide different role based workspaces so that users with different responsibilities in the organization can see the content that is most appropriate to them. Further, individual users can personalize their workspace by rearranging existing content, or adding and removing widgets.

With 3.0 RC3, Openbravo puts the user at the center of the ERP experience.

My Openbravo is only one of the many exciting new features of Openbravo 3.0 RC3, which also includes:

• New configurable login page;
• Support for modal windows that replace pop-ups;
• New styling that renders 2.50 classic windows with the new 3.0 look and feel.
The last feature is very relevant as it demonstrates how a new window built as an extension or delivered as a module in 2.50 looks and behaves when upgraded to 3.0 without taking any action to convert it to the new technology.

Openbravo 3.0 RC3 is intended for production usage by early adopters and it is a fully supported release available in all editions, Community, Basic and Professional Edition.

If you are a new user interested in learning about Openbravo and evaluating the product, you should consider using Openbravo 3.0 RC3. If you are an existing community member interested in staying up to speed with the latest evolutions of Openbravo, you should download and install Openbravo 3.0 RC3.

If you are interested in deploying Openbravo for production usage in a new project, you should consider either Openbravo 2.50 or Openbravo 3.0 RC3 depending on the time frame of your implementation and your attitude towards both risk and change.

If you are already using Openbravo 3.0 RC2 for production purposes, we recommend that you update to RC3 as soon as possible.

If you are using Openbravo 2.50 for production purposes, you will need to wait for a later RC before upgrading to 3.0.

Early adopters interested in deploying Openbravo 3.0 RC3:

• are recommended to thoroughly test planned business processes before deploying release into a production environment;
• should be prepared for both UI and functional changes in subsequent releases; future 3.0 release candidates will provide improvements in usability and system operation but will require users of 3.0 RC3 upgrading to those releases to be able to absorb significant changes.
  
If you want to learn more about Openbravo 3.0 RC3, please review the release notes for a full description of the release, download instructions or Amazon EC2 AMI codes. If you are pressed for time and have only a few minutes to learn about the product, you can take it for a spin in our demo environment by logging in with user name "Openbravo" and password "openbravo".

We are confident that you will be as excited about 3.0 RC3 as we are. As always, you are encouraged to tell us what you think, by posting a comment on this post, raising an issue in issues.openbravo.com or discussing it in the Early Releases Discussion forum.

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