We have just published our development plans for Openbravo POS 2.20. It follows the spirit of the previous releases: frequent releases, improvements in functionality, localization and stability of the application to make Openbravo POS a top Point of Sale solution in the global market, growing in the number of supported countries and translations in every release. Openbravo POS 2.2 follows the principles of all the versions of Openbravo POS: simplicity, easy to use, visually attractive, robust and scalable.

We request the collaboration of the community to help us to define and identify the most important features that need to be included in the product and things that need to be fixed. Your collaboration is important because you are the best people that are able to identify what is missing in Openbravo POS for each country and for different market segments. You are invited to the Open Discussion forum of Openbravo POS to discuss what do you want to have in the next releases of Openbravo POS.

The objectives of this roadmap is to continue to add value to partners and users of Openbravo POS to help them to develop a business around Openbravo POS, attract interest of current partners and potential partners of Openbravo. In Openbravo 2.10 we did a lot of efforts in this area with the new reports model and the improvements in scripting support and we want to continue in this area.

We have already published a draft of the roadmap for the release 2.20 in the wiki of Openbravo POS with the features what we think are the most important for the next released of Openbravo based on the time schedule and the resources that we have. This roadmap is not closed and we were are willing to align it with the needs and priorities of the Openbravo community.

Openbravo POS is and open source product and developed in a collaborative maner. During the last three months, we have started successful collaborations with individuals and companies that are working on extending the Openbravo POS functionality. For Openbravo POS 2.2, we plan to add in the core product new functionaries developed by third parties. You can guarantee that a particular feature is developed sooner rather than later by leading the development. We are willing to coordinate with people that is planing to invest on Openbravo POS product development to make sure that the results are going to be shared by all the community.

Using the wonderful Opensuse build service I have built a set of packages for OpenSuse and Fedora. You can download them from:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/openbravo/

The packages for Fedora should work well under CentOS and Red Hat. You have the source code of the packages available and also a bug report with some know issues.

Please, let me know if you have any issue installing these packages.

Notice that these provided as they are. Use at your own risk.

As many of you already know, we are having bimonthly community chat meetings.

The sole objective is this chat meeting is to discuss with you our planed roadmap. Some of the discussion already has started in our forums following Paolo's call for your feedback.

If you are planning to develop a module or feature for Openbravo this is a good opportunity also to synchronize efforts.

Here you have all the information for the fourth meeting:

Date: 18th of June at 14.00 GMT
Where: IRC Network FreeNode at the #openbravo channel
Language: English

Please, if you are planning to attend it is important that you add your name to the chat meeting web page. If you are not familiar with the chats, we have a Wiki page that explains how to setup the software and get connected.

We started using Sourceforge two years ago, and since then we have done an intense use of it. Sourceforge is a great place to start a project because it gives you all the community tools you need in one place. But when projects grow, initial requisites may change and Sourceforge may not have all the flexibility needed.

As you may already know, we have been working in changing our issue tracker from SourceForge to Mantis. The transition is now complete and we now use Mantis as our only tracker. From now on, please report issues at issues.openbravo.com.

The main advantages of Mantis are that it provides a lot of flexibility, it has multiple projects, advanced filtering, subversion integration, advanced access level management, customizable issue workflow, issue relationships… Additionally it’s open source and that ensures us we can change it in the future.

All bugs have been migrated from Sourceforge to Mantis. From now on, you should only work with Mantis. New bugs should be reported there and old bugs can also be found there. When reporting a bug, remember to follow our guidelines.

If you have any comments about our implementation of Mantis, please feel free to tell us so. You can post general ideas as comments to this post or you can report defects and feature requests at issues.openbravo.com in the project Mantis@OB.

Thanks to the many people that participated on the first Openbravo community survey.

I would like to share with you some of the main conclusions:

· 50.77% of respondents work for micro SME companies
· 47,69% of respondents are people related to information technology or software developers
· 52.31% of respondents have have less than 1 year of experience using ERPs
· 33.85% of respondents never worked in an open source community before
· The main areas of planned contributions of the respondents are participating in the forums and doing localizations
· 81.54% of of respondents use PostgreSQL

These results helps us to better understand the background and objectives of our community members.

Regarding Openbravo ERP product feedback, we got the following results (been 5 the maximum):

· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's extensibility capabilities? 3,2 (Absolute deviation 0,82)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's customisation capabilities? 3,35 (Absolute deviation 0,96)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's installation? 3,31(Absolute deviation 0,98)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's functionality? 3,55 (Absolute deviation 0,67)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's documentation? 2,5 (Absolute deviation 1,04)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's quality? 3,45 (Absolute deviation 0,81)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's performance? 3,16 (Absolute deviation 0,81)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's ease of use? 3,29 (Absolute deviation 1,00)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's ease of contributing? 3,17 (Absolute deviation 0,86)
· How do you rate Openbravo ERP's business value? 3,73 (Absolute deviation 0,73)
· How do you rate your overall satisfaction with Openbravo ERP's? 3,56 (Absolute deviation 0,8)

I would like to comment on some of these results:

· Installation used to be a major area of complaints for Openbravo ERP due to the number of components that are part of his stack and are needed to run the application. The installation process was enhanced when we licensed BitRock technology for Openbravo installers. We created also more documentation for the installation process, that many people helped us to enhance. The use of virtual images for evaluation also helped to easy the evaluation process. With Openbravo 2.40 we have fixed many small issues with the installer, that should help to rise the user's level of satisfaction.

· We know that documentation is a weak point of the product. Openbravo has been lately working a lot on this area and the community has played an important role. We have recently opened a full time position to put our documentation in good shape.

· We are very happy with the product quality results of the survey. There is no doubt that this has been one of the major areas of improvement during last year. Much better processes in place, the acceptance test or the opening of the Quality Assurance to our community. We are already in the process to deploy a more powerful bug tracking system that will allow us have a better control on Quality Assurance issues. We invite you to participate in the Quality Assurance efforts and assure that the bugs that are critical for you get fixed.

· Regarding extensibility capabilities that is going to be one of the major areas of improvements for Openbravo 2.50, specially on terms of plugins, verticals and its packing. We will shortly be sharing our plans regarding this.

· Regarding easy of contributing is something that we have still to work hard. We have the contributor's guide and some good process in place and a Forge collaboration platform coming in the next months, but still there are many things to do.

That's all for now. If you have any comments or suggestion please comment on!

This Sunday I watched again V for Vendetta, the comic written in 1982 by Alan Moore and David Lloyd and brought to the cinema by many of the filmmakers involved in the Matrix trilogy and directed by James McTeigue. If you like fiction, politics and films with a powerful message, you need to watch this movie. Here are some takeaways that I think perfectly apply to nowadays world of software:

1) Dictatorship tries to force what a reduced number of people believes is right. Freedom, on the contrary, gives choice to people and allows for new ideas to appear.

• Dictatorship in the world of software is represented by any company that thinks that through 100% vendor centralized approach they can satisfy the needs of all clients. Don't you think that the world is too large to be able to accomplish this by only a single vendor?.

2) You are free when you really have a choice to decide and, sometimes, human beings forget about being true to what they really want.

• There is too much FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) around software. Extensive FUD from proprietary vendors to open source projects. Some FUD from open source projects to proprietary vendors. At the end, users decide. Our role as IT professionals, regardless of what is our origin (proprietary or open source vendors), should be to ensure that users can decide freely without so much FUD generated and allowing to be honest about what they need and want. In that mindset, I am sure the right choice will always be made.

3) The power of freedom is in the community (and if not, watch the movie until the end: GREAT!) built by people/ organizations that have made their choice and join forces.

• This is by far the most important idea that open source brings over the table. An open source project with a successful community will always win in competition against 100% centralized proprietary vendors. The change proprietary players need to push within their organizations to adapt to the new paradigm of collaboration sometimes breaks the principles in which they were created. This is what I like about Openbravo: we are strictly built on the principles of open collaboration with users, partners and individuals who can contribute their ideas at will. Our principles are built on top of our competitor's weakest points.

Finally, for the ones that have seen the movie, I love the sequence when the inspector has that feeling of "I know what is going on here", "everything is connected". I sometimes have the same feeling. And the feeling is great because is when you discover that all facts, feedback that you get from the community, partners, clients, VCs, employees,.. plus your own thoughts come along into building a disruptive model: the leading open source ERP movement. ;-)

Anyway, this is what I wanted to share with you from this weekend. If you have seen the movie or you see it, please don't forget to leave your comments here.

Long live to V!

It has been a while since my last post and I want to apologize because of this. Although I am not the kind of person that has a natural blogging gene, I promise I will still try to keep on sharing with you my thoughts around Openbravo.

To resume my blogging experience I want to tell you two quite obvious things:

• Openbravo is doing great and as a result of our growth we have successfully closed our second financing round. A round which was planned from the day we acquired our first investors in Jan 2006 . And a round that does not only give us additional resources to invest on our products and community but also strengthens our Board and gives even a more international profile in line with the nature of our opportunity.
• My second obvious message is a logical one and is for you: Thank you so much for your interest on our products, your decisions to adopt them, your willingness to contribute your experiences and above all your willingness to be successful in opening the world of ERPs. We will continue to be faithful to our vision and continue to improve all the things we do with professionalism and emotion as we have done from day one.

Talk to you soon!
M

Openbravo has just announced the release the latest version of Openbravo POS. This has been a hard work that continues with the plan of Openbravo to make frequent releases. As usual you can download the binaries and sources of Openbravo POS from the Sourceforge project files page.

There is a large list of new features and improvements. This is a summary of the changes included in the version 2.10:

• New customers module. With this module Openbravo POS users will be able to assign customers to receipts using the customer's loyalty card, create invoices, track the customer account, make customers payments, execute customers reports, and more.

• New localization features. To achieve the support of the taxes laws of different countries and cultures Openbravo POS now includes a new event system that allows to execute developer scripting code and adapt the receipts generation to the rules required. In this point there also has been included a new dialog that allows to split a receipt between two or more customers and a useful cash change calculator based on the country coins and banknotes. More information: Openbravo POS Scripting Tutorial.

• New reports structure. With the new reports structure developers of Openbravo POS will be able to add and modify easily new reports and charts without having deal with the source code. Reports are now defined using plain text files that developers can edit using his preferred text editor or a graphical designer. To install newly created reports is as simple as copy the report definition files to the reports folder and create a menu option for the report. All reports and charts of Openbravo POS has been ported to the new structure and new reports has been created. More information: Openbravo POS Reports and Charts Tutorial.

• Improved integration with Openbravo ERP. There has been included in the previous integration more data like customers synchronization and warehouse information synchronization. More information: Openbravo POS Integration.

• Sample database. A sample restaurant database has been created for evaluation purposes with a list of products, images, users, and operational data. Available only from the SVN repository.

• Included support for the IBM SurePOS 500 Series.

• Many other other minor features and bugs fixes. For example:
  • Users can log on using his employee card with his / her token stored in the magnetic band or printer in the bar code.
  • Customer information can be assigned to the current receipt reading his / her loyalty card.
  • Split a receipt payment between customers.
  • The size of the selector and product buttons is configurable by the administrator.

We feel proud of this release but there is a long road ahead. The community around Openbravo POS is growing every day, is willing to collaborate and is very active proposing new functionalities and customizations for different countries, industries, ... Now we are working on the project plan for the next release 2.20. With the help of the community we trust that Openbravo POS will succeed.

One of the values at the core of the Openbravo project is collaboration with the Community in all aspects of the product life cycle, from planning, to build and launch.

A few days ago, we published Openbravo ERP 2.40 alpha. While we are still very much focused on stabilizing that release, it is also time to start planning for the next one, 2.50, and we intend to do that in collaboration with our Community.

For that purpose, we just published a forum post to discuss the release candidate features and their relative priorities.

Our feature list is very ambitious and addressing everything on that list would require an effort that is easily an order of magnitude bigger than our actual capacity, so we need to choose wisely.

This is an opportunity to influence that choice by commenting on the list and voice your needs by replying to my post.

I would also remind you that you can guarantee that a particular feature is developed sooner rather than later by volunteering and doing the work yourself. We had several such contributions in 2.40 and we hope to have more in 2.50.

I look forward to a very lively debate on the priorities for Openbravo!