Open Source ERP Guru

Pentaho is a leading Open Source BI suite. It contains all components required from an enterprise-grade BI solution-reporting,dashboards,analytics engine,ETL and data mining. The reason I am covering Pentaho here is that I believe an open source BI can complement the open source ERP solutions I cover here.

The Pentaho offering is a classical, ‘modern’ open source model – you can download,install and use a ‘basic’ edition of the software for free, but Pentaho charges for additional ‘enterprise class’ functionality, support and some advance administration options.

The installation itself (I am installing Pentaho 1.7 GA) was not as straight forward as I expected and required some manual work. Because of that, I will write a complete installation guide, hoping it will save some time and effort to others who plan to install Pentaho. I will run the Pentaho server on my Linux Ubuntu Box.

Pentaho is written in Java, running on Jboss application server. That makes integrating it with Openbravo or Compiere somewhat easier, both written in Java as well. However, BI solutions are platform agnostic – they only rely on the underlinying data layer and are independent of the programming language used to write the ERP system.

Pentaho is a BI solution and it requires a database that will contain the data to be analyzed or mined. For that purpose, I will use a Mysql database, provided by Pentaho, with some sample data.

BTW – Pentaho delivers several out of the box default users and passwords. They can be found under the ‘Valid Users’ drop down menu on the upper-right corner of your Pentaho installation homepage.

Sample Pentaho Report

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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
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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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As part of our open source ERP Installation Guides series, we will walk through the installation of Postbooks, an ERP solution from Xtuple.

The Business Software Hybrid Model

Xtuple took a path which is becoming increasingly popular among business software vendors – adopting a hybrid model, combining free,open source offering along with proprietary, commercial products. This trend, of companies selling commercial products while releasing some of the code as open source, emphasizes the strength of the open source movement, especially in the context of business software – these companies understand they can benefit from the advantages of the communities flourishing around open source projects. The licensing fees these companies loose due to the free distribution of their software is covered by services they offer around these strong products.

Back to Postbooks, it is the younger sibling of OpenMFG, a mature, well established manufacturing solution. Postbooks focuses on Accounting and CRM, complementing OpenMFG’s strong manufacturing module. You can see from our own open source ERP projects activity trends page that Postbooks is a very active project with over 400 daily downloads.

As I always do before installing open source ERP software, before of going to the projects’ Sourceforge download area,I first visit its official website.

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Compiere is the most popular open source ERP software to date – largest number of downloads, channel partners,consultants and live customers. The first ever ERP software I installed was Compiere, back in 2002. It was quite remarkable back then – for me,ERP software was this huge,complicated software that requires 10 days to install,not mentioning the money you would have to pay for licenses. I desperately looked for a 30-days trial of commercial ERP solutions but soon realized I would have to be the CIO of a 1B$+ company to get any attention from those guys.

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Neogia is one of several open source ERP solution built on top of Apache Open For Business framework (Ofbiz). The Apache open source project provides a set of services required to operate a business – create customer records,products and sales orders, for example. The Apache project does not provide a complete solution but rather the building blocks for a real ERP application. I feel that applications built on top of OFbiz have a good chance to be successful. Apache open source projects provide commercial-grade, robust solutions that power the almost infinite growth of the Internet. Applications such as the Apache web server, Tomcat and Lucene are all top-notch applications, offering quality,ease of use and ROI that few commercial products can compete with. I hope that OFBiz will evolve to become as important to the business community as other Apache projects are to the Internet. 

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Adempiere is a spin-off project from Compiere, arguably the most popular open source ERP solution on the market today. Whenever that kind of spin-off happens, especially from an open source project, you know that the members that left are hungry. They are hungry to prove they can do things better than the original project,otherwise they would not have left. Going to Adempiere’s website, I was anxious to see how the Adempiere project is doing.

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One of most exciting things about open source ERP software are free downloads. No commercial solution will allow you to just go to their website,click on ‘Download’, go to a Wiki page that gives you step-by-step installation instructions, and then,within an hour or so,you have your own ERP system!

I started my installtion process by visiting Openbravo’s website, although I knew the actual downloads of the Openbravo software were hosted on Sourceforge servers.

The way I see it, if you consider yourself an open source ERP solution, your homepage should have a visible,top-level link called “Download”. Clicking it should take you straight to the download page. OpenBravo did just that – on their homepage,in the top right-hand side, a link to the download page,taking you straight to the Sourceforge download page. Nice!!

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