Dear friends,
This last year at Openbravo has been an extremely exciting and at the same time a very encouraging experience.
It seems like only yesterday that we were releasing our code on SourceForge and hoping that there would be a receptive audience of people interested in helping us to build the world’s best open source ERP solution. Just one year later, the sheer volume of interest, support and success we’ve enjoyed has been amazing.
After publishing our source code in April 2006, Openbravo rapidly became one of the key open source ERP reference solutions, with consistent top rankings in every major metric of activity compared to all other software projects published on SourceForge. Since Openbravo passed the 100,000 downloads mark on New Year’s Eve 2006, download rates have continued to grow. We are now opening our second office, in Barcelona and have continued to expand our team with excellent professionals experienced in handling the growing international demand and opportunities that exist for Openbravo.
In September 2006 we officially launched our Partner Support Unit by unveiling our Friendly Partner Program. Distinguishing Openbravo from other start-ups in the space, this program allowed us to build a network of 20 partners with whom we have been expanding our services while fine tuning support processes and acquiring further partners to help scale up our offering. The confidence that Openbravo gained through working with our first partners and the constant help and feedback we received was crucial in guiding the design of our latest program and we very much appreciate every effort and continued support.
In April 2007, having successfully closed our initial friendly partner phase, we launched an unprecedented, breakthrough Partner Program. This new program, which I invite you all to review, incorporates some extremely innovative services that contribute in creating a secure and powerful network of international partners. Today, thanks to this program, we are able to attract best-in-class partners from all over the world. They rely on our expertise to extend our successes to a large array of end customers of all different sizes and from a variety of sectors.
These successes have not gone unnoticed. We’ve been discussed in magazines such as Fortune, CIO Magazine, and Enterprise Open Source Magazine. We were also invited to join the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) as a founding member alongside companies we very much respect, including JasperSoft, CentricCRM, Talend, SpikeSource and Hyperic. We are extremely positive about the work being developed there to foster interoperability among different open solutions, and proud that our COO Josep Mitjà has now been invited to act as OSA Board Member. Other leading open source gurus and companies have also helped us in our plans, and it would be unfair not to mention the help we have received from them (you know who you are ;-) ). Thank you so much!
We’ve been fortunate enough to work with some fantastic developers and be assisted by a wonderful group of employees and friends. The success of the Openbravo project on SourceForge has been built upon through the creation of the Openbravo Wiki, while the demand to use and develop Openbravo worldwide has led to localisation projects for over 20 different countries. As requests have come in for features like PostgreSQL support and a web services interface, the incredible talents of the developers and supporters of Openbravo have continued to meet and exceed our goals.
While we are proud of our successes, we’re even more excited about the future. Forthcoming developments including a thrilling new web interface, revised focused ERP functionalities and interfaces to the other leading open source projects are being created right now and will be released over the next few months. In addition we are working on the next generation platform architecture of Openbravo, code-named Openbravo Green. You can see our progress and goals for Openbravo Green on our publicly-available roadmap. Making our roadmap public is just one of the ways that we aim to show how transparent and shared our vision is. We truly believe in open source development, and that a web-based open source ERP solution can not only match the proprietary solutions available, but surpass them and create a solution that redefines ERP software in the process. The only way to make our goals happen is through the continued hard work of many, many people. For those who have helped us with that hard work and invested their trust, time and effort in us, please accept our sincerest thanks.
For those of you now joining our broad community, we wish you a warm welcome and thank you for joining and opening ERP’s future!

eLearning, a self guided teaching tool making education available to anyone worldwide, is now at www.openbravo.com. This teaching medium represents another important step in effectively spreading information. Giving Educational Services the go-ahead to start investing in such a costly learning tool says something more…From your partners ask for quality first; then think about the rest.

The plug: B0 – Introduction to Openbravo, "will help end users, developers, business consultants, project managers and directors get a quick snapshot of Openbravo features and a brief insight into its architecture.” It can also be used to show off the product to end clients, as a pre-requisite for our Functional and Development trainings, etc. Check out the online demo.

Returning, back, looking at the landscape across all industries, it is quite common to see companies running in-class or web - based sessions. However, there is a reason why RedHat, SAP, and Novell are among the comparatively few companies with an eLearning offering: quality takes time, effort, and money; but the results can be worth it. This is because users can be reached with the exact same information, in a content format that confirms understanding of the material, and using a self-paced medium available the comfort of their office.

Below are some of the questions we had to answer when deciding to invest in the eLearning format:

STRUCTURE AND PROCESS

• Do we know how to do this? Well not really at first, so our solution was to hire some a top eLearning consultant located in Barcelona and have her help pick the production team.
  
• How long will the process take? eLearning isn’t easy, and a simple 5 – 8 hour course may take one or many months, depending on the complexity.
• Do we have the human resources to invest in such a lengthy process? Two people from Openbravo were on this task full time, and another four gave between 20-50% of their effort to make it happen.
• Does eLearning make sense financially? It was a worthy investment, and made sense for our business model discussed above.

Conclusion: Dedicated resources and time are necessary … and if you do not know what you’re doing, it will be a miserable experience to try and go it alone.

CONTENT

• Does our target audience need it? We think so, seeing how we’re constantly adding new partners around the world, and in-class sessions cannot match the time or location demand.
• Are the objectives for the course clear? By starting off with an introductory course, it’s very easy to manage expectations.
• Why start with an introductory course? By starting off with an introductory course built in modules, our eLearning sets up well to be the first step in following specific training paths. Investing in eLearning shouldn’t be done if meant for only one course; rather the first course should be designed to lead a trainee down subsequent paths in the future.
• What future content should be shown? Doing the introductory course, and touching all major sections of an Openbravo trainee's potential educational path, we identified what type of content makes sense for eLearning, and what type of content is best left for the in-class format. Some typical analysis areas included the following: potential variability of material, user follow-up questions, goals for the user upon completion of the course, the desire of a user to complete specific material in this format, and need.
• Does the material lead to many questions outside of the scope? Major point...if yes, the material is not suitable for eLearning.
• What is the hardest challenge? The hardest challenge for us was taken text content and making it go live. It’s one thing to write an in-class training; but when there is limited space, and no teacher to answer questions, clarity rules all.

Conclusion: Start by asking what objectives you want to accomplish for your target audience, and recognize the long challenge of making material go live and stand alone on the page.

In the end, we like to call our partner program a 100% quality-based partner program. As we ask for quality, with current and future services such as eLearning, Educational Services is attempting to ask offer the same.