Openbravo Network Edition - It Rocks!
Some time ago I got my hands on a copy of Openbravo Network Edition. Network edition is Openbravo’s answer to ‘What’s your business model’ question, facing any open source business application vendor. It provides everything a business needs to trust Openbravo with its business managements operations-professional support, IP Indemnification, Controlled updates and upgrades,Bug fixing guarantee and a new web based remote administration console. In this post, I will focus on the administration console.
The idea sounds promising - a central administration console, allowing you to monitor and manage your Openbravo instances. It provides the standard features of system services stopping and starting, simplified access to log files, scheduled reboots and more.
But the two most promising features of Openbravo Network are one-click backup, and more importantly, restore, as well as automatic updates. Having some experience as a systems’ administrator, I can’t really emphasize how important these two features are. Backups and upgrades are usually complicated and error prone processes.
Automatic Updates
Updating an ERP system to its latest release can be a nightmare. For larger ERP implementations, planning and testing an upgrade might take months. Upgrades are so critical because they can have huge negative business impact. If something goes wrong, you can have problems manufacturing, shipping goods or properly invoicing your customer.
Openbravo Network offers an amazing feature - a single click upgrade. Sounds too good to be true. Not only that, but if things go wrong, you have a single click rollback!! .
I tried running the upgrade on my Openbravo instance, and it worked like charm. However, my system is just a test system. I believe that in real world, production environment, upgrading might become more challenging. In particular, the issue of customization needs to be addressed - when you upgrade, there is a good chance your customization might break. Carefully planning and testing is crucial, and Openbravo Network makes that as lot easier.
Backup and Restore
Another powerful Openbravo Network feature is a single-click backup and restore. You can restore your Openbravo instance to a windows shared directory or an NFS filesystem. Again, things are pretty straight forward-define your backup destination, click on backup, and vouala, you got yourself a backup. But more importantly, restore is as simple as backups, just press that Restore button, you don’t have to spend your weekend restoring your ERP system!.
Again, the backup and restore tests I ran worked flawlessly, but for production, customized systems, things have to be carefully tested.
The recorded demo shows how simple it is to backup and restore an Opnebravo instance using Openbravo Network. Just click on the image below, and our recorded demos page will appear. select ‘Openbravo Network Edition” from the Openbravo drop-down menu.
Openbravo Network Backup Procedure - Recorded Demo
Openbravo Network edition will undergo further evolution, there is no doubt. To stay up to date on all the latest news, consider registering to our RSS feed.
Openbravo To Partner With Pentaho To Provide Embedded Business Intelligence
Openbravo, one of the leading open source ERP vendors, is enhancing its analytical capabilities by integrating with Pentaho, a leading open source BI solution provider. Some of Pentaho’s modules will be embedded into Openbravo’s ERP application.
There are several approaches to providing BI capabilities to an ERP solution. The most common approach is to have two completely separate,dedicated systems - one for ERP, the other for BI. The BI piece will include a data warehouse, where operational data from the ERP systems is stored, a reporting tool and an analytical engine, working on top of the data in the data warehouse. An ETL tool, in charge of extracting data from the ERP system and uploading it to the data warehouse database, is also required.
The main advantage of this configuration is that it separates between the operational system and the analytical system. If you do not separate the two, you will find yourself with an ERP system that is overloaded with user queries, that might bring your operational users to a complete halt.
The disadvantage of the separation is that it can become a complicated, expensive and an unreliable process. Also, having to manage additional systems (your BI servers) in your landscape has its overheads.
There is also a hybrid model, where some of the user queries are performed against the operational system, while some are done against the Bi servers.
It is interesting to compare the two leading open source ERP solutions, Openrbavo and Compiere, in their approaches to Bi functionality. Openbravo is talking about ‘embedding’ Pentaho’s modules into their ERP system, so there is no separation here. It makes things much easier (and much cheaper) for customers implementing Openbravo, as they have BI functionality out of the box. For Openbravo, it means they have to invest in developing that integration.
Compiere took a different approach. They decided they do not want lock-in with any specific BI vendor or tool, so they provided a business view layer, which allows system administrator to easily generate database views. These views are generic, allowing any 3rd party reporting or analysis tool easy access to Compiere’s data. The views could also be used by the ETL tool, in a separate ERP-BI configuration.
We are yet to see the Openbravo-Pentaho integration (it’s due to be released next month), but we’ll provide more details once its out.
To stay up to date on the latest open source ERP news, register to our RSS feed.
Compiere Web UI On Google Chrome
We covered Google’s new web browser, Chrome, a couple of days ago. We will now get a chance to see how Compiere’s web UI plays with Chrome.
The experience is similar to that of using Openbravo - the application renders fast and smooth. You will also notice in the recorded demo that Google added an ‘application mode’, making Compiere feel like a regular desktop application.
Since the future of all business software appears to be heading away from the desktop and toward the browser, we will conduct a benchmark of 3 browsers - Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 7 and Google Chrome, running open source ERP. To view the results and many other open source ERP related stories, we recommend you to register to our RSS feed.
The recorded demo can be found in our Flash Comparator, along with many other open source ERP recorded demos. you can find the Compiere-Chrome demo in the Compiere drop-down menu.
Compiere Web UI Running On Google Chrome
Is Google Chrome Open Source ERP, Business Ready?
The net have been buzzing for the past 24 hours over Google’s surprising announcement of its new open source browser, Chrome. I haven’t seen any sources yet, but I’m sure they’ll release it soon.
Do we really need another browser? Google believes we do. After conquering the Internet, Google is after our desktop. The new browser would integrate seamlessly with the operating system, making web-based applications feel like regular application. Google sees a future where traditional desktop applications are made to be run on its browser, and the browser becomes the desktop. In other words, they want to kill Microsoft windows.
For the business user, that means he will no longer need to maintain various client software installed on his desktop. And most modern application, either running from the cloud of from within the enterprise, are already browser based.
Most open source ERP applications have a web UI (including Openbravo and Compiere) and are a natural fit into Google’s vision.
We decided to test drive Google chrome and see how well it copes with open source ERP applications. We have used Openbravo for this recorded demo, to be followed by another demo of Compiere’s web UI.
Google’s new browser is very light, fast and smooth. It renders pages with unusual ease and its footprint is minimal. It did have some issues rendering properly some of Openbravo’s screens.
One of the coolest things you can do in Chrome is take any tab (e.g. the Openbravo app tab), detach it from the browser and throw it around - the idea is that the Openbravo tab is no longer just a web page running under your browser, but a stand-alone application you can run from your desktop.
The Openbravo On Chrome recorded demo was added to our ever-expanding list of open source ERP recorded demos, which can be found in our Flash Comparartor page. To stay updated with the latest news on open source ERP, register to our RSS Feed.
Open Source ERP Openbravo Running On Google Chrome - Recorded Demo
Openbravo Sales Order Report Recorded Demo
A business lives by his customers’ orders. Probably the most frequently used report in any ERP system is the sales report. It is being run frequently by several different organizational functions - salespoeple, logistics, accounting and customer support.
Openbravo provides easy access to this report from its Sales Management menu. You can filter the results of the report by quite a few parameters - customer, product, product type, region, warehouse or product category.
The output of the report is in a nicely formatted HTML, although Openbravo offers several of its reports in PDF format.
To view the sales order recorded demo, open the Flash Comparator - it’s a collection of recorded demos of open source ERP applications. Select ‘Sales Order’ from the drop down menu under ‘Openbravo’.
Openbravo Sales Order Report - Recorded Demo
Click Image to open the recorded demos player
Meet The CEO - Compiere’s Don Klaiss
Meet The CEO is a series of interviews with open source ERP industry leaders. Compiere’s CEO, Don Klaiss, is our latest guest.
According to Don, Compiere is the ‘oldest’ open source ERP project, with over 1.4 million downloads. They boast a community of 50,000 members - developers, users and partners. Paying customers are in the thousands. Most of the revenue generated through subscription goes into engineering - improving product and supporting partners. This is the beauty of the open source model - the emphasis is on development rather than marketing.
Traditionally,many of Compiere’s customers have come from the distribution industry, making Compiere focus their development on supply chain, distribution and global financials. Next month, Compiere will announce further enhancements of its ERP product in the distribution areas-warehouse management and manufacturing, amongst other.
Don also mentioned Compiere’s second round of funding. He did not disclose further details, but I expect this round to be over 10M$ (their first round was 6M, Openbravo raised 12M in round 2).
Meet The CEO - Interview With Compiere’s Don Klaiss
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