Compiere – Initial Client Setup
The next series of blog posts will introduce Compiere, the most popular open source ERP solution today. I know some would disagree about the open source nature of Compiere, but that is a separate discussion.
We will start by creating a Client – or Tenant – in our vanilla Compiere system. After that, we will create a business partner, a product and a sales order. That would allow us to compare Compiere to Openbravo and later, to additional open source ERP solutions.
Needless to say, a flash tutorial of the Compiere initial client setup is attached to this post.
Prerquisite – Installed Compiere system
Compiere Client Vs. Tenant
The first thing you want to do after you completed installing an open source ERP software is to create a Client for your company. You can find more details about Clients in ERP systems here. Compiere has introduced a new term that replaces “Client” – Tenant. Obviously, from a technical point of view it doesn’t matter if you call this object Client,Tenant or Resident. From a marketing perspective, using the word Tenant implies the possible usage of Compiere as a hosted solution in multi-tenancy mode, where you could have several companies running their ERP on a single Compiere server.
Other than the different terminology, creating a new Tenant is suspiciously similar to creating a new Client in Openbravo. Both solutions provide the exact same screen that allows you to easily create a new Client. I can’t tell who was the first one to introduce that simplicity, but it’s really cool to be able to do that so easily.
The one thing that took me a long time to do is to find the Initial Tenant Setup in Compiere. I quickly realized that the user I have been using (GardenAdmin) cannot create new Tenants. I tried to find documentation that will explain which Compiere user is required to create a new Client (Tenant) but I just couldn’t find it anywhere.
System User for Creating a New Tenant in Compiere
After several fruitless attempts to find the relevant document,I thought I’d take a different approach-since Adempiere is a projects who’s roots are in Compiere, I Googled ‘Adempire initial client setup’ and immediately found an Adempiere Wiki entry related to that, which indicated that I need to use the ‘System’ user to create new Clients. I logged into Compiere with user System and password System and found the ‘Initial Tenant Setup’ under ‘Tenant Rules’.
Having already created a Client in Openbravo, creating a new client in Compiere was a breeze.
Flash Tutrial – Compiere Initial Tenant Setup
[kml_flashembed movie="http://opensourceerpguru.com/flash/CompiereInitialClientSetup.swf" height="570" width="900" /]
[...] our last posts, we have setup an initial Tenant in Compiere, followed by creating our first customer. This post will walk you through creating a product in [...]
Is there any way possible to create a tenant automatically (given a few required fields)? It seems Compiere is doing everything possible to stop someone from doing things as automated as possible and you need to hire a guy behind the computer as an operator
Thanks a lot! It took me days finding the “Initial Tenant Setup” ’till I found your post. Seems like Compiere doesn’t want the CE user to know it.