Open Source ERP Guru

Software projects are on a constant cycle of development, testing, releasing and fixing. open source ERP projects are not different.

I would like to update on the latest released version of the different solutions and elaborate a little about the projects’ development roadmaps.

Openbravo

Openbravo latest release is R2.35 maintenance pack 1 which was released back in early January 2008. It contains mainly bug fixes, focusing on improving stability – no new functionality was added. Openbravo have been lately releasing an impressive amount of localizations for countries such as south Africa, Romania, Venezuela, Malaysia, Singapore, The Netherlands, Argentina, Poland and France. Localization for ERP software is so important because without it, it’s almost impossible to use the software due to language differences and local accounting regulations.

Read the rest of this entry »

We continue the Apache OFBiz series with the creation of our first customer. Similar to other open source ERP solutions, OFBiz treats a customer as a sub-type of Party (other ERP software use the term Business Partner instead of Party), so creating a customer is very similar to creating a user,another type of Party, which we already did.

One thing that I am noticing about OFBiz is that it is strongly oriented towards B2C type of companies. As you can see from the flash recording attached to this post, the customer creation screen requires you to input a first and a last name. Obviously, nothing is stopping you from using these fields as placeholders for company name, but I see this as yet another sign of the strong B2C orientation of OFBiz.

Read the rest of this entry »

Apache OFbiz project is a relatively new open source ERP solution. Being the new kid on the block has its advantages – it allows you to easily integrate unique functionality around your core software that provides added value for your users. More mature software packages sometimes find it difficult to fully adapt to modern trends as they feel it might damage their stable core, a core they worked for years to improve. Also, it is sometimes technically impossible to add new technologies to existing software.

OFbiz took advantage of that fact and incorporate into their open source ERP offering several unique features,extending its core ERP functionality, which can be found in very few ERP solutions. This post will present some of these features – Embedded BI(Business Inelegance), eBay and Google Base interfaces and supports for the Oagis standards.

Read the rest of this entry »

In our last post we walked through the installation of Apache OFBiz. Once you got OFBiz installed and running, you should be able to access the OFBiz software by pointing your browser to http://server:8080/webtools (where ’server’ is your server’s hostname) . We will use OFBiz’s default user – admin (password OFBiz) to login and start setting up the system.

Just like we did with other open source ERP software we setup – Openbravo and Compiere, we will create our company,a couple of users and import a chart of accounts file. Obviously, there are a lot more configuration steps you would take if you would go to production with OFBiz, but for our purposes these steps are sufficient.

Attached to this post you will find the first recorded flash tutorial of Apache OFBiz. We will also add OFBiz to the Flash Comparator, so if you did not visit the Comparator yet it’s time you do.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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. 

Read the rest of this entry »

If you read my post 3 Core Business Processes Open Source ERP Must Support you already know that there are at least 402 open source software projects listed as ERP solutions in Sourceforge. You also know what are the core scenarios a real ERP solution should support.
One of Open Source ERP Guru’s main objectives is to provide valuable information for companies looking into ERP solutions in general and open source ERP solutions in particular, and the first thing to do is to narrow the list of 402 down to a more manageable number.
The following is a list of open source ERP solutions that can be called ‘true’ ERP, are open source and (at least partly) freely available:

Read the rest of this entry »