Open Source ERP Guru

The global IT industry is on a constant consolidation trend. This trend is powered by two vectors – small software companies find it next to impossible to compete against the industry leaders ,while IT MegaVendors, are always looking to broaden their product and service portfolio, usually through acquisitions.

The business software world is especially centric and the competition is fierce. Companies that have been selling technology and middleware to support the deployment of business applications are looking for new revenue streams. These companies can either develop business applications from scratch (highly unlikeable) or acquire existing business software vendors. Open source ERP solutions are perfect acquisition candidate for this strategy.

These post will discuss the possibility of an Open source ERP acquisition by large IT vendors, focusing on potentials buyers.

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IT professionals might consider open source ERP as an exciting new step in their IT careers.

Taking an active part in such projects is very simple (would you imagine going up to a proprietary ERP vendor and tell them ‘I want to write my own code for your software’???). I can’t think of any better (and cheaper) way to network with other enthusiastic professionals looking to make an impact on the business software world.

Also, if you work as a system integrator,custom developer or business consultant, open source ERP might just be the thing for you.

open source ERP Guru also provides some insight into matters which are beyond open source ERP, focusing on business software and open source.

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Open Source ERP software is the perfect solution for anyone making their first steps in the ERP world. You can downloaded the software for free,install it on a commodity computer (I have 7 different ERP solutions running on a 512MB, AMD Sempron machine).

The ERP beginner will also benefit from a friendly, professional community around each of the projects, more than willing to help.

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For small or medium businesses, open source ERP solutions are a perfect fit- they are free to use, easy to implement and provide a wide range of functionality that can easily cover your business requirements.

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The amount of information available on Open Source ERP Guru has been growing steadily. Also, the number of readers is constantly growing.

In order to improve the user experience for my readers, I decided to add easy access links at the top of each page, targeted at 3 main groups:

• Small-Medium Business
• E.R.P. Beginners
• IT Professionals

I believe 90% of my readers belong to at least one of these groups. At the top of each page, you will see 3 links – each link will lead you to a page containing links to the resources on Open Source ERP Guru which are relevant to that group. Clustering the information by audience groups makes a lot of sense and I hope it will help everyone find what they are looking for.

The next 3 short posts will contain the pages with links to resources aggregated by audience. These pages will be updated constantly to reflect additional material available on Open Source ERP Guru.

When I first started open source ERP Guru, I was hoping it could have positive impact on the open source ERP community and I am happy that it started to pay off – TinyERP opened its source code to the general public!.

The move was initiated by one of my readers, Raphael, who posted a request on TinyERP’s forum,asking the project team to consider again the release of Tiny’s source code , citing my blog in that forum post. A couple of days later, the source was released in an announcement published on the same forum thread.

I am very happy that I had some part in making TinyERP’s source code available. I hope my reviews of the different open source ERP solutions will cause more projects to take the path TinyERP took and publish all their source code for free,unrestricted use.

I first noticed what was going on by reading comments posted by Raphael and Yogi(?), TinyERP community members. I would like to take the opportunity to thank them both for their detailed comments.

The rest of this post will answer the issues they both raised. I strongly suggest reading their comments as they provide an interesting insight into the burning issues surrounding open source ERP projects. I hope other projects’ community members will provide their insight as well.

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We continue the Apache OFBiz series with the creation of our first customer. Similar to other open source ERP solutions, OFBiz treats a customer as a sub-type of Party (other ERP software use the term Business Partner instead of Party), so creating a customer is very similar to creating a user,another type of Party, which we already did.

One thing that I am noticing about OFBiz is that it is strongly oriented towards B2C type of companies. As you can see from the flash recording attached to this post, the customer creation screen requires you to input a first and a last name. Obviously, nothing is stopping you from using these fields as placeholders for company name, but I see this as yet another sign of the strong B2C orientation of OFBiz.

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Apache OFbiz project is a relatively new open source ERP solution. Being the new kid on the block has its advantages – it allows you to easily integrate unique functionality around your core software that provides added value for your users. More mature software packages sometimes find it difficult to fully adapt to modern trends as they feel it might damage their stable core, a core they worked for years to improve. Also, it is sometimes technically impossible to add new technologies to existing software.

OFbiz took advantage of that fact and incorporate into their open source ERP offering several unique features,extending its core ERP functionality, which can be found in very few ERP solutions. This post will present some of these features – Embedded BI(Business Inelegance), eBay and Google Base interfaces and supports for the Oagis standards.

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In our last post we walked through the installation of Apache OFBiz. Once you got OFBiz installed and running, you should be able to access the OFBiz software by pointing your browser to http://server:8080/webtools (where ’server’ is your server’s hostname) . We will use OFBiz’s default user – admin (password OFBiz) to login and start setting up the system.

Just like we did with other open source ERP software we setup – Openbravo and Compiere, we will create our company,a couple of users and import a chart of accounts file. Obviously, there are a lot more configuration steps you would take if you would go to production with OFBiz, but for our purposes these steps are sufficient.

Attached to this post you will find the first recorded flash tutorial of Apache OFBiz. We will also add OFBiz to the Flash Comparator, so if you did not visit the Comparator yet it’s time you do.

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Apache’s Open For Business (OFBiz) is one of the most promising open source ERP projects today. Apache projects are known for their high quality and are being used in almost every computing environment – either on the Internet or inside large organizations.

The next few posts will focus on OFBiz – we will start with installation, followed by creation of some master objects (customers,products), and some transactional data(sales orders,inventory movements etc.) . I will also go into details regarding the architecture of the OFBiz solution as it is a very modern one and interesting to investigate. I believe that through that architectural overview we can learn much about modern business application concept.

I will also try to add statistics from the project to the Activity Page (OFBiz allows you to create a custom RSS feed but I am not sure what data is exposed) and you can expect to see quite a few flash tutorials to give you an idea about how OFBiz looks and feels.

Once we get OFBiz covered, we will be able to compare the 3 leading open source ERP offerings : Openbravo,Compiere and OFBiz. All recorded flash tutorials will be available in our Flash Comparator and we welcome anyone who is interested in comparing these solutions to visit the Comparator.

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