TinyERP Installation Walkthrough
I have been covering TinyERP for the past few months. I found that Tiny has a real enthusiastic community, many of whom wondered why I didn’t consider Tiny as one of the leaders in the open source ERP space. Their greatest forte,I understand, is the ease of customization and the large amount of plug in modules (~200) that were developed around the core server. I decided it was about time I got a hold of of a working ERP system from Tiny.
Like all other Installation Walkthoughs, I do not plan to rewrite existing installation manuals (I will point you to the one that worked for me) but to provide thoughts on the installation processes, ease of use and initial feelings about the product. BTW, the default user for Tiny is admin, password is admin (this question keeps coming up after any open source ERP installation).
To get the installation going, I Googled up Tiny. Although Tiny is re-branding and is now called OpenERP, I visited to tinyerp.com. It would take at least several months until everyone (including Google) gets used to the new brand-OpenERP(I covered this re-branding in my last post). The download page was moved to the openerp.com domain. Going there, I clicked on the OpenERP link on the left menu and vouala-the downloads page.
I decided I’d go for a Tiny server installation on my newly-born Ubuntu 8.04 box (just upgraded from an older 6.10 Ubuntu) and the Tiny client on my PC. You also need a PostgreSql database to to go with the TinyERP server.I used the one installed on my Ubuntu Linux box.
TinyERP UI
TinyERP 4.2.2 Server And Client Installation
Installing Tiny on my Ubuntu machine was really simple because you can use the apt package manager to install Tiny with all of its dependencies, all using a single command. On other Linux or Unix flavors you would probably have to take care of the dependency issue manually.
The step by step guide I used during the server installation processes was:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TinyERP
and although it was written for Gutsy, which is an Ubuntu version older than my 8.04, it worked like charm.
I followed that by the windows client installation which was also a pleasant surprise- just your regular next,next,next windows installation.
After configuring the client to point to my Tiny server, and creating a new database for my installation, I was able to login to Tiny.
The approach taken by Tiny to populate a separate database for each installation pays out when you consider using TinyERP as a multi-tenant hosting application (a SaaS deployment) – you just create a separate database for each customer and off you go. It makes administration so much easier and can help improve performance, two of the most challenging issues for any Saas-model application, especially ERP.
The UI looks very simple but ‘feels’ robust. At a first glance it looks like the functionality is very basic, but I’m sure that this is where the plug-in modules really shine, providing additional required functionality.
To summarize, the installation was very smooth, another sign of maturity of some of the open source ERP products.
