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.
