Buidling Great Communities

Tomorrow Paolo Juvara and I will bet at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco, CA.

OSBC is the premier strategy event for the open source industry. It was founded in 2003 by Matt Asay, who is an Openbravo advisor. Paolo and I plan to meet several of our peers to exchange ideas and best practices.

Additionally, I will participate in a panel to discuss the nuances of community building. The panel will be moderated by Stormy Peters, Executive Director and the Gnome Foundation.

Key ideas I will voice include:

• The importance for all the company to become "community" and embrace community processes and communication channels
• The importance to lead and set example if you want others to follow
• The importance of recognition and meritocracy
• The importance to invest in tools to lower collaboration barriers

I bet you recognize some of the initiatives we are taking in Openbravo to make the above statements a reality.

I will share my learnings after the conference in a follow-on post.

Openbravo SMB Network 2.40 is available

Some weeks ago, we announced the availability of Openbravo SMB Network 2.40, the professional subscription service for Openbravo ERP 2.40.

Openbravo SMB Network 2.40 is now the recommended choice for SMEs who want to deploy Openbravo ERP for production use.

Compared with the previous release, Openbravo ERP 2.40 provides:

• Improvements in the user interface for better productivity, including full keyboard navigation and better visual feedback in the user interface
• Better support for international deployments with better support for multi-schema accounting, withholding tax, VAT register or international bank account numbers
• More out-of-the-box reports and functionalities like purchase requisitions support, goods receipt by PO number, enhanced projects & services module or historical salary category
• Enhanced and more out-of-the-box reports
• More capabilities built into the platform like enhanced security, audit trails and additional web services

For more details, you can read the complete release notes for Openbravo ERP 2.40.

Additionally, the Openbravo ERP SMB Network 2.40 appliance contains significant improvements compared to the previous edition, notably

• Updated Administration Console
  
  
  • New, cleaner look and feel
  • Improved usability with better user feedback


• Improved performance per GHz
  
  • Native support for 64 bit architecture
  • Latest versions of Ant, Tomcat, Apache and Oracle

Existing Openbravo Network subscribers can migrate their systems to the latest Openbravo ERP release and receive support with he same level enjoyed in the previous release without the need to pay additional fees. However, it is important to notice that the upgrade process will require a development project that clients will need to contract to their system integrator of reference on the basis of the need to update custom code developed for them. Therefore clients should only upgrade to the latest release if the new functionalities available offer an immediate return on investment.

Go Professional! Buy Openbravo Network.

Disaster recovery with Openbravo SMB Network

The fact that Openbravo ERP is a mission critical application means that it is very important to have a disaster recovery plan.

Usually, and certainly more frequently than it should be, this type of plan is just an afterthought. Quite frankly, it is also very common that the recovery process is not fully tested or documented.

In those rare cases where the plan is properly laid out, System Integrators have generally required a large number of consulting hours to craft it and clients are rarely happy with the expenditure this entails.

Luckily, Openbravo SMB Network includes a nice functionality that offers this facility without the need to develop any complex process. Using the Administration Console, system back-ups can be scheduled regularly. These back-ups can be done against a remote file server for increased reliability.

In case of disaster, a simple restore process enables you to have a fully functional system up and running again in a matter of hours. Another neat benefit of the Openbravo SMB Network appliance.

Go Professional! Ensure the systems you are managing are properly protected.

I run a heavily cutomized Openbravo ERP system. Is Openbravo Network right for me?

This is one of the most frequent questions I get from (prospective) customers. Fortunately for everyone, the answer is a clear "YES".

One of the strengths of Openbravo ERP is the freedom to adapt it to every company's specific needs without limitation. This involves configuring the system's metadata, and very frequently, developing new functionalities to meet those specific requirements that make every company unique. On some occasions, the customizations done on top of the "standard" version are very significant.

However, this does not mean that you cannot benefit from Openbravo Network, the professional subscription service that has been designed to keep your system up-to-date and bug-free for a predictable cost.

Firstly, the service is built around the concept of system stability. The updates are designed to intricately target only the lines that require a fix, minimizing the likelihood of collision with custom developments. Therefore, in most of the cases, updates are silently applied without any conflict.

Secondly, the service is based on a ground-breaking application of source code management tools which are now part of Openbravo ERP. This approach provides a very granular and structured way to manage code conflicts during the update process, which help consultants apply fixes even when they are for the very same files that have been customized.

Attempting to undertake manual maintenance of a production system is simply not realistic, and too risky. Very often, only a handful of customer-reported bugs get fixed and the system is not properly patched. The situation gets much worse when several systems are maintained in parallel for several clients, and inevitably the quality of the manual maintenance process starts begins to deteriorate.

Openbravo Network has been designed to ensure Openbravo systems can be properly maintained so that they are fully up to date, with the quality required for a mission critical application, and in the most cost efficient way.

Go Professional! Buy Openbravo Network.

The future of Open Source in Europe

Next Wednesday 24th September, I will be in Paris to attend the Paris Capital du Libre event.

I will participate in a panel to discuss the future of Open Source in Europe.

You can find the agenda for the event here.

Openbravo Network: Commercial and Community symbiosis

During the launch of Openbravo Network, many mistakenly interpreted Openbravo adopting a closed source development model. This is not our strategy because we believe there is a better way.

My previous post is a very illustrative example of how customers benefit from having an open community, and how the community benefits from having customers funding it.

All bugs fixed for Openbravo ERP are available in the development trunk and incorporated in the newest release of Openbravo ERP, which typically occur twice a year.

Openbravo Network clients benefit from having regular and timely access to bug fixes, both for bugs reported by them or reported by the community. They get the benefits from using a product which is subject to public scrutiny and at the same time enjoy production grade SLAs (Service Level Agreements).

Community benefits from the effort funded by Openbravo Network customers to fix bugs, which are readily available in the development trunk and periodically packaged whenever a new release is published (or even before, if –occasionally- a community maintenance patch is published).

If you use Openbravo ERP and want to see it improve, engage in the community.

If you use Openbravo ERP and want production grade support, subscribe to Openbravo Network.

You are helping yourself in both cases.

300 fixes

During the past months, since the official launch of Openbravo Network –the subscription support service for Openbravo ERP–, our clients have received patches containing:

• 214 Openbravo ERP fixes
• 35 Linux component updates*
• 5 Operating Environment updates (in Oracle Database, Apache Server, Tomcat, Ant and Java)*

In total, these account for more than 300 fixes, including a few security and critical ones.

Bugs fixed include those reported by Openbravo Network clients and bugs reported by the Openbravo ERP community. Bugs reported by our clients are treated according to production grade SLAs (Service Level Agreements) to ensure fixes are available on time.

For Openbravo SMB Network clients, fixes also include patches for the operating environment, which in many amateur implementations is not well kept up to date, eventually exposing the system to security threats.

Before fixes are released, a rigorous quality assurance process certifies there are no compatibility conflicts and they are production ready.

For Openbravo SMB Network clients, patches can be easily applied from Openbravo Network’s administration console. Also, because the Openbravo SMB Network One environment is a highly standardized configuration, we can test the patches in exactly the same environment our customers have. This dramatically improves the effectiveness of our quality assurance process, optimizing it for production usage.

Overall, this service, recommended for any professional Openbravo ERP implementation, is designed to ensure the system stays updated, bug free and secure.

* Only available for Openbravo SMB Network One customers
* Note that component updates typically contain several fixes each one