When Bigger was Better

As recently as a decade ago, technology gave large enterprises the advantage.  They were able to implement large-scale software systems to streamline their distribution, cut prices, and put smaller competitors out of business. Bigger was better, and box stores and “category killers” displaced the “mom and pop” stores.   Small businesses were increasingly pushed out into service sectors, where it was harder to create such large-scale efficiencies.

If you’re into movies, You’ve Got Mail featuring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan pretty much summed it up: the big bookstore pushing the cute little neighborhood shop out of business, and the small business owner quit retail to become … a writer of children’s books, which was what she knew and loved.

Open Source Changes the Game

Now open source has turned the game around for the technology-savvy small business.  Open source software has not only leveled the playing field between small and large businesses, in many cases it has helped propel small businesses ahead of their larger counterparts. Today, open source infrastructure software such as Apache, MySQL, and PHP help small businesses get online online quickly and cost-effectively. Open source blogging and content management software such as WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla! are the forefront of their fields, and they are helping small businesses create unique brand identities online.  Finally, open source ERP and CRM software such as opentaps now give small businesses enterprise-class management software, but with the flexibility to tailor it to their particular market niches.

In contrast, larger companies in traditional industries have been mired with expensive but outdated commercial software, and it has slowed their progress in the growing online marketplace.  This is why many of today’s most successful online businesses, including Facebook and Google, grew straight past their traditional competitors–they all started as small but nimble companies powered by open source.

Looking ahead, I see open source software empowering many smaller, niche-oriented businesses with unique product offerings and personalities, and together these smaller businesses will take an increasingly larger chunk out of the online marketplace.  The flexibility of open source software allows smaller businesses to create unique products and brand identities for themselves, and the low cost of open source software has lowered the barriers to entry and made it profitable to service smaller niche markets.

A Sequel?

So if we made a sequel to You’ve Got Mail and called it “You’ve Got a Tweet!”, what might have happened? Tom Hanks’s big chain book store might have been bought out or pushed out (hey, there’s always a bigger fish.)  But then they could have started a nice little business selling children’s books online and complemented it with a blog.  It would have a cutesy and quirky look and a loyal fan base.   No Amazon.com, but they’d do well enough to move out of the big city and into a nice country house to spend more time with their family.

And under the surface, it’s all powered by open source software.

I wanted to get this new edition out to you as quickly as possible, because I believe it would help you get up on this incredibly powerful and flexible (not to mention low cost!) ERP and CRM solution faster than ever before. With opentaps 1.5M1, you should be able to setup your company, load your products, customers, and suppliers, and get started using opentaps without spending all sorts of time configuring your company and importing data.

That means you can start doing the things you need to do faster: tracking sales leads, selling to customers, getting them to pay you. In the amount of time it would take to set up a simple desktop accounting package, you can be up and running with a full web enabled, enterprise class ERP and CRM solution.

Stay tuned for our “How fast my company got up and running with Open Source ERP and CRM” contest!

I wrote in our last quarterly update that

Our main goal for opentaps 1.5 is to make it easier: easier for users to get up and running and easier for developers to start extending opentaps.

Let’s see how we’re doing…

We are now getting ready to release opentaps Open Source ERP and CRM 1.5M1, the first milestone for version 1.5.  Starting with this version, setting up opentaps and loading your data is easier than ever before.  You can set up opentaps from the base template, with pre-configured warehouses, product stores to start from.  Just use the web interface to change the name and contact information for your company.

Then, use the new data import user interface to load your data from an Excel spreadsheet and copy over the chart of accounts template.  You should be able to start entering orders or sending out invoices right away.  If you are using opentaps CRM, you can use the new upload leads feature to add your leads to opentaps and get going.

For developers, opentaps 1.5M1 offers these new features:

• The domains directory is now more flexible. Any component of opentaps can register new domains or override an existing domain, so it’s easier for you to customize key functionality.  See extending the domains driven architecture.
• New configuration entities allow you to store key configurations into one place in the database.  Some of the new features in opentaps uses these entities to make it easier to customize how opentaps works for you.
• Base entities and services Java classes have been compressed into jars, to make opentaps take up less memory in Eclipse
• In opentaps CRM, you can now use the configuration entities to control security settings for viewing accounts, leads, and contacts. For example, you can make them available to all users or hide them from anyone who is not the owner or assigned to an account, lead, or contact.

Putting it all together, this is how it looks — importing data for your company, with default parameters and help text set in the database configuration entity:

中文的opentaps

Thanks again to 袁徐磊 (Yuan Xulei) from Tsinghua University and Nanguache.com in Beijing, we now up to date Chinese translations for opentaps.  These translations were included as part of opentaps 1.4.1 released recently and will be included in opentaps 1.5 as well.

Please join us at our Chinese forum to meet the other developers and users of our growing Chinese community.

请参加我们的opentaps中文论坛，和其他中文的用户和开发人交换经验，共同在中国发展opentaps。

And For Next Time….

How long does it take set up an ERP system?

Let us show you how fast and easy setting up opentaps Open Source ERP and CRM can be, thanks to the ability to deploy opentaps in the cloud and the new base templates and data importing capabilities.

Under the “Leads” tab of opentaps CRM, you will now see a new link for “Upload Leads.”   This will take you to the screen where you can upload a spreadsheet of your sales leads, including their name and contact information:

There’s not much more to it: filling your contacts’ information, go to the screen, and upload them.  There’s an example of this spreadsheet in opentaps, and you can read more about it on the manual page for uploading leads.

In the upcoming version 1.5 of opentaps, the Data Import module will playing more active role for uploading your data and setting up opentaps.   You will see it with this icon when you log into the opentaps console:

Logging in, you will see this main screen:

This screen has three functions. The top portion allows you to import data into opentaps from “bridge tables,” and you can also get reports in either PDF or Excel format about your imports, including the status.   For example, here’s a report which shows how the import of your customers went:

The second part allows you to upload your data in Excel spreadsheet format, with products, inventory, customers, suppliers, and GL accounts in separate tabs like this:

The third part allows you to copy an existing chart of accounts set up from a template to any organization which does not have an accounting set up yet in the system.  For example, you can create a new organization in the system and then use a pre-configured accounting template for it.

All of this is available right now from the development version of opentaps at gitorious, and we will be making a milestone release of opentaps 1.5 for everybody soon.

Now I get it.  Google Wave is easier and more communicative than any other collaboration tool I’ve used before.  That’s what makes it better.  I’m not going to teach you how to use Google Wave here — if you haven’t used it, watch the Google Wave. Instead, let me summarize why I think Google Wave might be the future of software:

• It runs “in the cloud.” Obviously, since it’s from Google, it runs in the cloud, so there’s nothing for you to download or install.  It’s ready when you are.
• It reuses your existing identity. Even better, you don’t have to go somewhere, enter all your information, choose a username and password, and have to remember another account.  It uses your existing digital identity, a Google account.  This is better for everybody: you can be up and running faster; they don’t have to write and maintain user management screens; you don’t have to update your password on another website; they’ll always have up-to-date information about their users.
• Real time dialog.  Unlike other collaboration tools, Google Wave is real time.  If you and I were on the same “wave,” I can watch your comments as you type them into that wave.  This is incredibly addictive.
• Unstructured data with search.  Most project management tools have fields to store all sorts of data, like ticket ID, subject, description, client, status, and person it’s assigned to.  Google Wave is just text, like twitter.  It’s less structured but much more flexible.  Just like on twitter, you can add structure to your waves with “magic text.”  For example, “#100 @clienta [special project] %sichen {Done}” could mean that “ticket 100 for clienta entitled ’special project’ assigned to sichen which is now done.”  If you need to find a ticket, just search for the magic text, like “@clienta”, “%sichen”, “{Done}”.  This makes it trivial to customize Google wave — there are no tables to modify, no fields to add, no queries to change.
• Fluid boundaries.  This is the most amazing thing.  Each collaborative discussion can be started by choosing whomever you’d like to include.  The boundary between “us” and “them” or “insider” versus “outsider”, always so crisply defined in traditional enterprises (and enterprise software), becomes fluid.  Just like in real life.

A New Wave of Enterprise Software?

What if we could use Google Wave with pre-set templates? For example, what if we could have pre-set groups of collaborators or pre-set tags entered into Wave?  And then we can save standard queries based on those tags?

Is that the future of (enterprise) software?

opentaps Financials in Chinese — 中文的opentaps Financials（收财）:

opentaps Warehouse in Chinese — — 中文的opentaps Warehouse（仓库）:

opentaps Purchasing in Chinese — 中文的opentaps Purchasing（采购） :

• opentaps 1.4 Release
• New opentaps.org website, forum, and training video store
• opentaps-Magento integration
• Development goals for opentaps 1.5
• A proof of concept for opentaps 2.0 based on OSGi, Spring dynamic modules, and maven
• Amicon Technologies and IntegratingWeb join opentaps as opentaps Partners
• opentaps in China

opentaps 1.4 is Released

opentaps 1.4 was officially released in March 2010. This release features many new features in CRM, manufacturing, supply chain management, and financial accounting; improved user interface thanks to the Google Web Toolkit; hibernate keyword search; VOIP integration with Asterisk; improved Web security; the opentaps Domain Driven Architecture with Spring framework and hibernate; and upgraded versions of the Apache Tomcat and OFBiz. For more details, see our press release.

New opentaps.org site, forum, and training video store

We’re also very excited about the new opentaps.org, implemented with Drupal by IntegratingWeb. The new site has made it much easier for us to connect with our community, especially with the new opentaps Forum.

We’ve also launched the opentaps Shop, a Magento online store for opentaps training videos and related materials. This site will be our platform for offering opentaps-related products by all the partners and developers of opentaps.

opentaps Magento Integration Released

We have also released an integration between opentaps and the Magento e-commerce platform. This integration will allow you to download products and orders from a Magento store to opentaps, so you can use the CRM, supply-chain and warehouse management, and ERP features of opentaps with your Magento store.   Take a look at the opentaps-Magento integration video on YouTube to see how this works. To get started using it, see opentaps-Magento integration on the opentaps documentation wiki.

Development Goals for opentaps 1.5

Our main goal for opentaps 1.5 is to make it easier: easier for users to get up and running and easier for developers to start extending opentaps. We will be streamlining the process for setting up your organization in opentaps and importing your data. We are also going to make it easier for you to create new functionality for opentaps in self-contained modules. For more details, see the recent posting on the opentaps forum about these significant changes.

A First Peek at opentaps 2.0

OSGi is emerging as the industry standard for building large-scale modular applications. We believe it fits nicely with our long-term goals for opentaps, so we’ve built an initial proof of concept for opentaps 2.0 using OSGi, Spring Dynamic Modules, hibernate, and Apache maven.   You can  download this proof of concept from SourceForge and follow the directions on opentaps 2.0 Planning to try it yourself.

New opentaps Partners

Please help us welcome Amicon Technologies and IntegratingWeb as the newest opentaps Partners.  Both companies have a long history of working with opentaps, OFBiz, and other open source technologies, and we are very pleased to have them join us in making open source ERP and CRM a success.

opentaps in China - 在中国发展opentaps

I’ve met a number of opentaps developers and users from China, and they’ve all felt that there is great potential for an open source ERP and CRM in China.  If you would like to help promote open source ERP and CRM in China, please join us on the opentaps Chinese forum.

这几年我遇见过许多中国的opentaps开发者和用户。我们都觉得开源ERP和CRM企业管理软件在中国有很大的潜力。为了在中国发展opentaps和开源ERP, CRM软件，我们现在开始了一个正式的opentaps中文讨论坛。请各位参加我们的论坛，帮助我们在中国发展opentaps。

On this site we will be offering downloadable training materials for opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM. Some of these, like the training video for setting up products in the OFBiz catalog manager, would also apply to OFBiz as well.

We envision this site eventually to be a place where all the opentaps service providers and developers could sell their  training materials such as videos or e-books about opentaps or their add-on modules.

Some Thoughts about Magento

Here’s what I learned from this experience with magento:

1. Compared to other open source shopping carts or e-commerce systems, Magento is much more polished and out of the box ready to use.   We made very small changes to the out-of-the-box CSS styles, but the catalog display pages and most importantly the customer checkout sequence worked for us without any made modifications.
2. The way that Magento handles downloadable products like online videos is also well thought out. It allows you to have a sample download, so your customer can preview before buying.   You can set the number of times a customer can view the download. Last of all, it scrambles the download URL link for you, so somebody can’t just e-mail a download link to their friends  and have them get it for free.
3. The configuration was fairly consistent. Most of the setup could be done in the administrative user interface, though a couple things like call out messages were hard coded and required modifying files.
4. The administrative user interface is very professionally done and consistent.
5. Nevertheless, setting up an online store is still work.   There were quite a few screens you had to go around to set up your store, categories, products with prices, links, etc.  It almost makes me wonder “aren’t there other online video stores out there?” Shouldn’t there be a standard template already?