Open Source ERP Guru

Adempiere is a spin-off project from Compiere, arguably the most popular open source ERP solution on the market today. Whenever that kind of spin-off happens, especially from an open source project, you know that the members that left are hungry. They are hungry to prove they can do things better than the original project,otherwise they would not have left. Going to Adempiere’s website, I was anxious to see how the Adempiere project is doing.

I Googled Adempiere. The first result was adempiere.com. I clicked on the link, and after a couple of seconds, I noticed things were quite. Too quite. The site’s design is very clean and pleasant, but the first thing I notice is a “Adempiere 3.20″ message, dated Wednesday , 16 May,2007, 6 months old. I know that Adempiere is one of the most active open source ERP projects today so I’m probably doing something wrong. I also look for the ‘Download’ link, but nothing is there, on the adempiere.com homepage. Looks like an abandoned house. Something’s wrong, I’m not in the right place.

I click around, finally hitting adempiere.org. The site is not as professional looking as ademipere.org, but I’m glad to see training notices in Germany and the Philippines. I’m even happier to find a ‘Download everthing’ link, and a great Google map with markers and pictures of the project’s team members. I think it’s a great idea to have that kind of openness in an open source ERP project.

My take on this is that if someone is looking,a-priory, to Adempiere as an open source solution, he would probably end up visiting adempiere.com. He will look around, notice that the latest news are six months old, and there’s a good chance he’ll just leave the site and look for some other open source ERP solution, assuming Adempiere is not an active project. That’s a real shame because there is so much going on with the Adempiere project, but it’s not transparent enough outside the community. I think the people at Adempiere should either update the news section in adempiere.com or place a clear message at the top of the adempiere.com homepage redirecting visitors to adempiere.org. Implementing neither suggestions should consume a lot of time, as I am sure the Adempiere community is working hard on improving the product. Just my 2 cents.

Now to the Adempiere installation-to get started you will need 2 things – installation files and installation guides. From the adempiere.org, I could find both links. The download link got me to Sourceforge, where I downloaded Adempiere 3.3.1b. While the installation archive is downloading, I checked the Wiki.

Understanding exactly what I was suppose to do in order to get Adempiere running on my server was not trivial. You have to follow a number of pages to get everything right. I was hoping I could find one longer page that explains every step so I can easily follow and go back and forth if needed. There is a drawing that helps understanding the process, but a one-page installation guide will be very useful, one for Linux and one for Windows.

I’m installing Adempiere on my “enterprise-class” ADM Sempron,512MB RAM and 40GB memory machine, hoping to get it to run ~5 open source ERP solutions. OS is Ubuntu 6.06. So far it worked fine and I will not upgrade to a newer Ubuntu version unless one of the installations fails because of the Ubuntu server version.

Due to prior installations, I already have Java 1.6 and PostgreSQL 8.1 installed on my Linux server. That means I can skip some of the steps outlined in the Adempiere installation guides. I will add these steps to this guide so you can use it to install Adempiere from scratch.

Adempiere installation steps:

• Step 1 – Install Java and PostgreSQL:

http://www.adempiere.com/wiki/index.php/Debian_and_PostgreSQL_Install

• Step 2 – Setup Adempiere server:

http://www.adempiere.com/wiki/index.php/InstallServer

• Step 3 – Create Adempiere Database

http://www.adempiere.com/wiki/index.php/CreateDatabase

• Step 4 – Complete Adempiere server install

http://www.adempiere.com/wiki/index.php/InstallComplete

After installation is completed,make sure you do not have any port conflicts between your Adempiere installation and other running Tomcat instances.

After a couple of hours, most of them spent around the documentation trying to figure out which documents from the Wiki I should use, I got Adempiere running!

After running Adempiere ,I noticed that it did not have an out of the box manufacturing module. If you read my article on core businesses processes open source ERP solutions should support,you know that having a manufacturing module to support Make-To-Order and Make-To-Stock processes are a must. Going back to the Sourceforge download page, I found that the second download, right after Adempiere, is Libero – another open source project, integrating into Adempiere as a manufacturing add-on. I could find a binary installation image that contains Libero as part of Adempiere, but I preferred to try to add Libero to my existing Adempiere installation. I could not get it to work yet, but as soon as I will have time to make it work, I will post a detailed Libero-Adempiere integration guide.