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.

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.

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.

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.