A few days ago, we launched our first Community Survey to better understand the background and objectives of our Community Members. We would really appreciate it if you could spend a couple of minutes filling the survey and giving us, in an anonymous format, some data points on your interests in the Openbravo projects.

The information collected is going to help us to prioritize our community activities, infrastructure investments and other aspects.

Go to http://openbravo.questionform.com/public/Openbravo-Community-Event-Survey and make your opinion count!

Thanks a lot for your help!

During June 21st and 22nd we will be holding the Openbravo Get Together in Miami, United States. The agenda is already available. There is a business day where you will get the insights of how to do business with Openbravo products and a technology day focus on Openbravo technology, product's roadmaps, localization and community services. The language of the event is English.

This is a great opportunity to learn about Openbravo products, do peer-to-peer networking and to share experiences with other Openbravo user's and developers. The Openbravo Get Together's are free and open to everyone, you only have to register. During this Get Together Brian Reale from Colosa Inc. will be visiting us and presenting the benefits of Colosa's open source workflow products and how they can add more value to Openbravo ERP implementations.

We are looking forward to meet you in Miami. If you have any suggestion or comment for this event please let us know.

Today we announce the availability on SourceForge of the public alpha version of Openbravo ERP 2.40.

This new version includes many new exciting functionality that kept us busy for many months and we are very happy to be able to finally show it to our Community.

Among the many enhancements, usability emerges as a main theme. Openbravo ERP has traditionally been a ground breaking project in terms of user interface: in 2006, with release 2.14 we were the first open source ERP with a web based interface; 2007 was another major milestone and with release 2.30 we were once more the first open source ERP to feature a skinnable and Ajax-enabled UI.
This year, we continue on that tradition and, with release 2.40, Openbravo raises the bar again and brings the productivity of the user interface to levels comparable to client server applications. In particular, users can now fully operate the system using only the keyboard and all most frequently used operations are just one click away and conveniently accessible through a short cut. In addition, users can configure their system so that, when they open a window, the focus is automatically placed in the most important field according to their specific business processes; this reduces the number of keystrokes necessary to complete a transaction and dramatically increases productivity. Finally, a new set of icons and a revised look & feel keep the user better informed of the status of the system therefore avoiding confusion and preventing costly mistakes.

Another major theme of the release is improved global operation support. With the enhanced multi-schema accounting capabilities it is now possible to account each transaction according to multiple accounting rules, in multiple currencies and in multiple calendars. This enables organizations with operations in multiple countries to comply with the local accounting regulation while at the same time apply a corporate accounting standard that allows roll ups and consolidation.
Many new features also improve the ease of deploying Openbravo in different geographies. The completely revised VAT module, for instance, allows a much better support for key reporting requirements in many countries such as VAT Registers and Withholding Tax. We are particularly happy about these features as they were developed by a community contributor, Cosmic Blue Team, which demonstrates the power of what a collaborative community can achieve.
In addition, the new International Bank Account feature enables users to out of the box define bank accounts according to their local conventions and therefore it avoids a very frequent customization.

Besides this, there are many other cool new features and you can find the full list in the Release Notes.

Please notice that this is only an alpha version and it is intended for evaluation and stabilization purposes only. Openbravo 2.35 MP4 remains our best version for production usage. In particular, you cannot upgrade an existing system to 2.40 alpha and you will not be able to upgrade a 2.40 alpha instance to any subsequent version.

That said, we do encourage you to download and install this new version and give us your feedback. You can post your opinion and question on the new features in the Early Releases Discussion forum and you can log any defect that you might find in the product using our new tracker system.

We hope that you will enjoy testing this new version as much as we did developing it.

If you have been participating on the Openbravo ERP or POS Acceptance Test you have noticed that we have started to use the Mantis issue tracker system at Openbravo. Mantis provides many benefits over SourceForge Tracker, the system that we have been traditionally using. Among them: better reporting, advanced query features, custom fields, tags and many others; all of this, coupled with a better system performance and an open source license.

We are still in the testing phase for the new issue tracker and we are tacking advantage of the ERP 2.40 alpha cycle to, at the same time, test our Mantis deployment. During a period of time of approximately two weeks, we will be using simultaneously Mantis -for issues on the 2.40 alpha release- and Source Forget Tracker -for issues on the production releases. After that period, Mantis will be fully in production and it would be the only system.

You can access the new tracker at issues.openbravo.com. We invite you to test it at any time. If you are testing 2.40 alpha, we would also prefer if you logged issues there while if you are using any other release, we would ask you to continue use SourceForge (but do not worry, we will attend to your request no matter where you log them). If you have any feedback, you can post it in the Openbravo Open Discussion forum. You can also log defects and feature requests on our Mantis implementation directly in Mantis by logging an issue in the Mantis@OB project.

When Mantis enters finally into production, we will blog about it and we will update the bug guidelines and other documents in the wiki.

Following our plan to make frequent releases, Openbravo is going to launch Openbravo POS 2.10 in few days. In this release we put a lot of effort in creating new and exciting functionalities for users and developers, and in localization to help to adapt Openbravo POS to more countries and cultures. If you are interested in participating in this acceptance test, please notify us by sending an email to collaborate to openbravo dot com.

The goal of this acceptance test is:

1. Test regression. We want to be sure that we did not break things that worked in older releases.
2. The new functionalities included in this release are stable and complete. We want to focus on the new customer module, new reports engine, integration with Openbravo ERP, and the new localization functionalities, like events in the sales panel and split receipt.
3. The installation and upgrade database processes work perfectly in all the databases supported: HSQLDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Oracle.
4. Starts properly in Windows XP, Vista and major distributions of Linux.
5. There are not major bugs.

The process is going to be very similar to what we do for the the last release of Openbravo POS and to what we do for Openbravo ERP. Specifically, here is what we are asking:

1. 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.
2. 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).
3. We will ask you to give us frequent updates on your progress.
4. If you have problems or doubts during the process, we will respond to your messages using the discussion forums
5. We will publish a daily status update on the forums.

Acceptance testing should start on the middle of this week, and ideally should last 3 or 4 days.

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

At Openbravo, we aim at serving our Community as best as we can.

For that purpose, we have launched the first Community Survey to better understand the background and objectives of our Community Members.
We would really appreciate it if you could spend a couple of minutes filling the survey and giving us, in an anonymous format, some data points on your interests in the Openbravo projects.

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
.
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,

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.