I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of Openbravo 3.0 RC4, the fourth release candidate in the Openbravo 3 series.

Openbravo 3.0 RC4 is a particularly important milestone as it is feature complete, delivering the new implementation of AD windows, and achieving the full user experience of Openbravo 3.

With RC4, Openbravo 3 delivers on our vision of Agile ERP, with a solution that provides:

• The highest productivity: easy to adopt and use, with a powerful user interface, and fully integrated.
• Complete business agility: functionally comprehensive, easily extensible with a modular approach, and fully upgradeable.
• Sustained ROI: cost effective to be deployed to the extended organization, providing universal accessibility through its web-based interface, and leaving users in control thanks to its open source license.

Future release candidates will be focused on minor enhancements, stabilization and incorporating the feedback received by early adopters.

Openbravo 3.0 RC4 is intended for production usage by early adopters and it is a fully supported release available in all editions, Community, Basic and Professional Edition.

If you are a new user interested in learning about Openbravo and evaluating the product, you should use Openbravo 3.0 RC4. If you are an existing community member interested in staying up to speed with the latest evolutions of Openbravo, you should download and install Openbravo 3.0 RC4.

If you are interested in deploying Openbravo for production usage in a new project, you should also consider Openbravo 3.0 RC4. Early adopters interested in deploying Openbravo 3.0 RC4 in production are recommended to thoroughly test the processes relevant to their business before deploying them in production.

If you want to learn more about Openbravo 3.0 RC4, please review the release notes for a full description of the release, download instructions or Amazon EC2 AMI codes. If you are pressed for time and have only a few minutes to learn about the product, you can take it for a spin in our demo environment.

As always, you are encouraged to tell us what you think, by posting a comment on this post, raising an issue in issues.openbravo.com or discussing it in the Early Releases Discussion forum.

A new product deserves a new logo. We have just finished the art work and are proud to share it with you. It will serve as an identifier and emphasizes the importance of Openbravo 3. The "3" represents agility, openness, and speed, the gradient flirting with a retro-futurism. It also leans a bit forward. That´s where we want to go, right? We have put the agile erp in lowercase text because we have "tamed" ERP. From now on, the user is in charge. You will find the logo soon (in the next few days) on the Openbravo 3 RC4 login page, on the demo site and through marketing communication. The product logo was designed by Volpus Design.

Just to let you know about the new About feature for widgets on Openbravo 3. Widget authors can now write a note to their users and add a link to their web site; an easy way to drive users to your business. For business partners this can be a great incentive to publish widgets. The top section contains widget specific information, the bottom section shows the metadata of the parent module, which is taken from our central repository in the Openbravo Forge. Author Message and Author URL are defined in the widget header. The About feature was developed by Asier Galdos from Almis, another great contribution from our open source community. Thanks Asier! About will be available in Release Candidate 4, to be released in the next few days.

According with the MDC the debugger statement was introduced in ECMA-262, Edition 5

Invokes any available debugging functionality. If no debugging functionality is available, this statement has no effect.

This statement is very handy when trying to debug eval’ed code like the View definition in Openbravo 3.0. It seems the only way to have an entry point to the JavaScript program running in the browser.

I’ve tested this statement in Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 4b10 and Chrome 9. And works when you have a debugger running. Note: In Firefox you need Firebug available for that page.

<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<script type="text/javascript">
function f() {
 var message = 'hello world';
 debugger;
 if(typeof window.console !== 'undefined') {
   console.log(message);
 }
 else {
   alert(message);
 }
}
f();
</script>
</body>
</html>

Here you have some screenshots:

Internet Explorer

Firefox

Chromium/Chrome

This morning a nice surprise awaited me in our Openbravo 3 test environment: Linked Items was added overnight and it works like a charm! This feature sits in a section in the form view and contains a list of all items that are related in the database. This is ultra handy of course if you - for example - quickly want to view all purchase invoices for a certain vendor or find all shipments for a certain product. A simple click on an item in the right column in the Linked Items grid launches the item on a new tab. This feature will be part of Openbravo 3 release candidate 4 which will be available mid February. Linked Items was developed by Valery Lezhebokov, an active member in our Open Source community. We are very grateful for his contribution and hope to see more of his work in the future.

• cheaper to attend
• more flexible for the student's daily schedule
• better integrated with Openbravo's existing documentation and offerings
• first class practical learning experience

As indicated by our students' ratings, the effort paid off. On a scale from 1 to 5, 1 being the worst and 5 being the best, these were some of the rating averages we have kept track of in 2010:

• Overall course grade: 4.13
• Course materials: 4.17
• Course instructor: 4.46
• Course acquisition of skills: 4.12
• Course platform and infrastructure: 4.29

One of our students that attended the two technical courses that have been rewritten and much improved in the past year says:


However, educating students is not enough without demonstrating their expertise. After all, our main enterprise building blocks are partners and certifications are a vital element in the world of competent Openbravo professionals. We are happy to say that the world has grown significantly in 2010:

• students that successfully completed our courses last year:

• 72 completed the Basic Functional Training
• 51 completed the Basic Technical Training
• 34 completed the Advanced Development Training

new certified professionals in 2010:

• 81 certified functional professionals
• 69 certified technical professionals

Become one or find one today!

Welcome to the world of certified Openbravo professionals!