Every couple of weeks I take the train from Barcelona to Pamplona. It is a four hour journey and although it seems quite long, I always enjoy the ride. Being offline lets me work without distractions on the more creative kind of stuff such as designing product features or writing blog posts. Or I just relax and listen to my iPod while watching the landscape blast by through the window.

A few days ago I was on my way to Pamplona once again and - following my ritual - after exactly 2 hours I decided to go for a coffee in the train cafeteria. While I got up from my seat, I noticed my colleague Xavi sitting right behind me! What a coincidence and how silly that I did not know he was (going to be) there. Using Facebook and Twitter, I know about the whereabouts and plans of many of my friends but I don´t always know what my colleagues are up to. So Xavi and I went for a coffee and donut and spent the following two hours talking about things that he and I were doing at the moment. We realized that our work activities have a lot of dependencies and that it would be good to know more about what other teams are doing. However, this is easier said than solved. The first problem is that none of us is really keen on planning meetings just to exchange information. The second problem is that many of us are geographically dispersed. Openbravo has staff in seven countries.

Would an internal social media application help to improve cross-departmental communication?

In the next few weeks a couple of colleagues and I will test Yammer, Chatter and Teambox. Actually we started this morning already with a couple of updates and I just learned that I have to bring back a tennis racquet to Barcelona this week when I return from the Pamplona office :-)

Thinking ahead, the next step could be to place one of these apps in an Openbravo Workspace Widget so you can use it directly from within Openbravo 3. Imagine how cool it would be to place links to Openbravo documents in status updates, such as "Jorge just received payment against invoice INV/010010". You would then just click that link and the document opens on a new tab.

Share your thoughts on the UX Lab forum.

We are proud to announce the immediate availability of the Openbravo 3 package for Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat for beta testing.

We want to invite you to test the new Openbravo 3 package for Ubuntu, and we will be more than happy to get your feedback !!

To test the package you have to:

1. Have a running Ubuntu Maverick installation.
2. Add openbravo launchpad repository URL’s:
   • Using the Ubuntu Software Center:
     
     Go Applications -> Ubuntu software Center, and then Edit -> Software Sources, go to Other software tab and click on Add button and insert the Openbravo ppa line: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/openbravo-isv/ppa/ubuntu maverick main.
   • Using the command line:

     sudo add-apt-repository ppa:openbravo-isv/ppa
     

3. Update the apt-get cache:
   • Using the Ubuntu Software Center:
     Not needed, automatically done when close the Software Sources window.
   • Using the command line:

     sudo apt-get update
     

4. Install the openbravo-3 package:
   • Using the Ubuntu Software Center:
     
     Search for openbravo-3 and click Install.
   • Using the command line:

     sudo apt-get install openbravo-3
     

Important: Migration from previous 2.50 package.

• The Openbravo package for ubuntu has two parts: the sources of Openbravo and the stack for run them. The stack (Apache, Tomcat, PostgreSQL, JDK and Ant) configuration is updated with the package update, but, the Openbravo sources are not updated within the package update and should be updated by the Module Management Console inside Openbravo
• So, If you have previously installed openbravo-erp (2.50 series) and you install openbravo-3 package, it will uninstall the previous one and will import the sources and database from the 2.50 package. After the migration It’s possible to return to the 2.50 package by simply installing it, this will uninstall the openbravo-3 package and return to the previous version since the sources and database are not touched
• Importat note: Currently openbravo-3 package contains Openbravo 3.0RC3, and the upgrade from 2.50 to 3.0RC3 is not supported , so if you have the 2.50 package installed and you want to test openbravo-3, please uninstall first the 2.50 package with apt-get remove --purge openbravo-erp. (WARNING: this will completely and permanently delete the database and sources of the openbravo 2.50 instance).

What is different than the previous openbravo-erp package for 2.50:

• The init scripts now are /etc/init.d/openbravo, /etc/init.d/openbravo-tomcat and /etc/init.d/openbravo-postgresql.
• The database is a new PostgreSQL cluster with name openbravo-3 and port 5943. To connect to it now you can use: psql -d postgres -U postgres -h localhost -p 5932
• The package base path is /opt/OpenbravoERP-3.0
• The package uses a different Catalina Base that resides in the new base path

And what is maintained:

• Openbravo-3 has the same access url: http://localhost/openbravo
• Uses the same user Openbravo and uses the same /home/openbravo/.profile
• The logs continues in the same place /var/log/openbravo-erp

We’re very excited with this package, help us fine tuning it for the final version!

Gorka

The past few hours have seen an increased Twitter activity on people giving favorable reviews of the new user experience of Openbravo 3.

The new product, with the new user interface, will become available to the overall community in our next release candidate, Openbravo 3.0 RC4, due for release in a few days. The code for this release is publicly available in our source control repository and it is very close to completion; a few members of our community have already been able to test it and are sharing their feedback in the social media.

This is great! And, in fact, we would love to get even more people trying the new product out and giving us feedback.

If you want to check it out and experience first hand what people are raving about, you do not need to be a developer, knowledgeable about code builds, or able to mess with source code repositories.

There is a simple trick to get local access to our latest build without having to leave the comfort of your browser interface. Just follow these simple steps:

1. Start by downloading an Openbravo 3.0 RC3 appliance.
2. Login as System Administrator and navigate to the Module Management window (General Setup -> Application -> Module Management)
3. In the Settings tab, specify that you will accept modules in maturity level "Test" for both scan for update and new module installation actions. The image below shows the relevant fields highlighted in red.Now your system is ready to be updated to our latest version under development.
4. Return to the Installed Modules tab in that same window and press the Scan for Updates button.
5. From here follow the normal update process, starting by clicking on the Install Updates Now, completing the installation of the new version and continuing with a system rebuild and a mid-tier restart.
6. Once you are done, you will be able to login in a preview version of Openbravo 3 and start experiencing the new user interface.

NOTE: at this stage, the client is very demanding on browser resources and we have not completed its optimization yet. Your system will be faster if you use either Firefox 4, Internet Explorer 9 or Chrome.

Keep in mind that this is a preview version, straight out of the tip of the code repository and that it has not gone through QA. You are likely to find instabilities and you should not use it for production purposes.
However, the system is certainly quite stable and it should be more than enough for you to get a sense of the great things that are coming very soon.

Spend some time playing with this product. I highly recommend it and I am sure that you will enjoy it as much as we do. Your feedback is important for us, so please do not forget to drop a line in the Early Releases Discussion forum letting us know what you think.

Hello,

Openbravo 3.0 offers customizable widgets that you can add to your workspace. In RC1 and RC2 we gave you static content, in RC3 we let you create simple widgets by pulling content from a URL.

For RC4 we will introduce two more types of widgets: HTML and Query widgets. This is were things get really exciting. The HTML Widget allows you to embed html code and the Query Widget lets you define a HQL Query with the columns to be shown. Here are two (real) examples, taken from a test server.

It does not take a lot of imagination to get an idea of the endless possibilities these widgets have. To give our users a glimpse of things to be had, we plan to include a set of cool widgets in Release Candidate 4. These would be role based so a sales person would e.g. get a widget showing the top 10 best customers by invoice amount and a finance person would see a pending invoices widget.

Now, we would like to ask you share your widget with us. The most useful (or coolest :-)) widgets will be packaged in RC4 so the whole world can enjoy them. You can either package them as a module and publish them on the Central Repository or just share the URL, code snippet or HQL query with us so we can paste them in.

You can share your ideas on the UX Lab forum. Bring them on!

Notes

• Download this document to learn how to create Query and HTML widgets. Refer to the earlier How to Create Simple Widgets for the first steps on creating a simple URL widget.
• RC4 is due for mid February 2011. Until that time, you can download the Query and HTML widget as modules to install on RC3.
• To facilitate working with HQL (e.g. testing your HQL before pasting it in a widget) you can download and install the handy HQL Query Tool

Hi Guys,
       It does not seem too long since I started blogging, but an year has gone by without notice..:). First of all wishing you all a great year ahead, and one piece of news is that I will be blogging through our official portal http://fugoconsulting.wordpress.com/. It will fun blogging through the official portal as some level dignity and standards are being maintained there (which is the reason why I did not prefer that.:) ). But now its time for me to go professional, so you can read my blogs @ http://fugoconsulting.wordpress.com/category/openbravo/. I am sure you guys will support my blogs there too as that's the only way I know, my blogs are being read. Waiting for more comments and questions there...:)


Happy Working...

I just updated the snapshot.xml script adding a new property exclude where you can define as comma separated values the patterns you want to exclude from the zip file.

If you are not familiar with this script, I suggest you read my previous post on how to make a snapshot of your Openbravo instance

I tested in some recent revision from pi, and excluding Mercurial metadata and the resulting zip file is almost 350MB smaller!

~/workspace/src/openbravo $ ls -lh openbravo-2011*
-rw-r--r-- 1 iperdomo iperdomo 254M Jan  5 11:04 openbravo-2011-01-05_11-02-07.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 iperdomo iperdomo 603M Jan  5 11:19 openbravo-2011-01-05_11-10-58.zip

How it works?

You just need to append the property with the list of excluding patterns in the ant call, e.g. Let’s exclude all the .hg folder

~/workspace/src/openbravo/pi $ ant -f snapshot.xml -Dexclude=".hg/**"

The exclude property is passed directly to the Zip task. In order to understand how can you define exclusion patters read the Zip task documentation

Happy new year!