Watching the Wiki evolve over the past year has been something special to watch. Openbravo is young, but with support like what we have received, life is rapidly improving. Over the last few months, I have particularly enjoyed watching take the community take the first steps toward building The Little Setup Guide, something Jordi briefly discussed about a month ago.

From the site, “This Setup Guide will guide you through your first Open¬bravo setup. After reading this how to you should be able to use Openbravo for "working" purposes.” Basically the goal is to one day be able to read this and get underway quickly. I like this guide idea because it’s about helping to get as many people started and working with Openbravo as possible. It’s about the community getting the community off and running.

Current Contents (available in English, Spanish, and German):

• Logging In
• Changing the following: Roles, Languages, and Menu
  
• Entering Data such as: New Clients, Users, Business Partners, Products, Prices, Taxes, and Financial Data (list not exhaustive)
  
• Procedures related to: Warehouse, Sales, and Procurement Management.

Note: Right now the document is incomplete with missing information and step by step procedures that have not been tested or are known to be incomplete. However, seeing the community get this started and working to improve it, we can see that this will change as the document develops, thus creating a strong document in time.

In case you didn't notice, Openbravo does not have an entry in the English edition of the Wikipedia, the fine community driven encyclopedia.

For some reason, the word Openbravo has been "blacklisted" and any attempt to create an entry about Openbravo gets automatically deleted.

The Wikipedia relies on a complex set of rules and policies which are enforced by the voluntary editors who are responsible for the quality of the site. Thanks to them, the Wikipedia remains an objective and dependable source of information. However, the "politics" in the application of these rules are, in many occasions, difficult to understand to an outsider. At least, this is my case.

I have opened a thread of discussion about the inclusion of Openbravo at
the talk page of a comparison of accounting software article. I have also requested it at the technology's requested articles page.

I would like to request the help of those of you knowledgeable about the inner workings of Wikipedia's community. If you believe Openbravo deserves an entry in the Wikipedia, can you show your favorable opinion in that threat? Can you help getting Openbravo out of the blacklist?

I know this is an argument Wikipedia editors accept, but I cannot understand why other fellow open source project are there and we are banned?

Sigh!

As you already know, Openbravo has acquired Librepos. I am very happy because now under the Openbravo umbrella, Librepos has more opportunities to grow and succeed. In order to be aligned with all the company products, Librepos will change its name to Openbravo POS, just an aesthetic change that will not change the soul of Librepos.

This acquisition will benefit the Librepos community of users and developers for several reasons. First, the continuation of Librepos is now guaranteed, Librepos will be an independent product of the Openbravo portfolio hosted in Sourceforge, and is and will be open source and licensed under the GPL. Forums will continue actively and there will be frequent releases of Librepos. Openbravo is a company truly committed to open source and believes in the strengths of the community to drive innovation.

Second, I will continue to be involved in the future of Librepos. I am the founder and main developer of Librepos since I published Librepos in January 2005. Now I joined Openbravo as Senior Architect and Librepos is part of my responsibilities. This is also great for me because previously to this acquisition I used to spend my spare time on Librepos, now I will have more time for Librepos, because now Librepos is part of my job.

And third, Openbravo ERP and Librepos are products that will benefit one from each other. Users of Openbravo ERP usually need a point of sale like Librepos and also users of Librepos usually need an ERP like Openbravo ERP. Both products are complementary and making both products run together and integrated in the same environment is a great value proposition for the retail market. It is already possible to integrate Librepos and Openbravo ERP, a solution that offers the possibility to share data between the two applications.

The future looks promising. Now we are working on the roadmap and business plan for Librepos. These plans are very ambitious and will be published as soon as possible. For sure, the most demanded features of the Librepos community will be included, and you can participate in these plans creating new feature requests and creating new bug reports.

Documentation for Librepos has been in the past the weakest side of Librepos. Now we will integrate the current documentation of Librepos in the Openbravo's wiki and will work to expand this documentation to achieve the best quality.

We are also planning a training event on December 17th - 18th for Librepos. This training event will be held in Madrid, Spain. This training event will be in Spanish but the material of the training will be in English. The details of this training will be available soon in the Openbravo web training page.

I look forward to meeting you in this first training of Librepos and discuss with you about the future and the possibilities of Openbravo ERP and Librepos.