The progress of the user experience redesign

Hi,

As a Openbravo ERP consultant and member of the Openbravo Community, I am always curious about what is coming next in the product; in particular, I am now interested in the progress of the new user interface for 3.0.

To satisfy my curiosity, I often ask Openbravo Product Development team fellows to show me what they are working on. I would like to share some screenshots I made while testing some of these features.

As a disclaimer this is work in progress and not an announcement of availability of these capabilities. There is a ton of work to be done to complete these cool features and it is evolving everyday. Just wanted you to be aware of the great features that will come in the new release, so we all can sense the power that is quickly reaching us... ;)

My Openbravo user dashboard and the new user interface are two of the main new capabilities Openbravo ERP 3.0 will have. Look at the screenshots to see what's coming...

http://imagebin.org/121579

The new My Openbravo where many different widgets can be configured. Custom webs, transaction widgets, reports, graphics...

http://imagebin.org/121581

Master detail view. In this example, as the user selects 3 modules and clicks on the DB_Prefix tab, the system shows the prefixes of all 3 modules.

http://imagebin.org/121580

Edit any record fields in grid mode.


This is great! What do you think ?

Openbravo Cloud Appliance. Using it effectively

The other day a customer running a Cloud appliance needed to replicate its production environment into 3 new servers. These were the options

1. Deploy Openbravo ERP by doing a custom installation in the 3 servers and then move the actual installation to these 3 new servers.
2. Deploy Openbravo ERP using a community appliance and then move the actual installation to the 3 new servers.

Using an appliance for deployment makes things not just quicker but a lot easier for the system integrator. You won’t just save some hours deploying each new server, but you will also be sure that everything is well configured and optimized.

Similar reasons apply to the task of moving the actual instance (database + modules) to the servers. It’s a time consuming task, moreover when you need to repeat it three times. There are a lot of manual commands to be executed and mistakes can happen. Even doing the steps correctly, this task for the 3 servers should take around 2 working days.

But, as the customer was using the Openbravo Professional Edition, they had the Cloud appliance up and running.

This made much easier the replication of the environment. The Cloud Appliance does not introduce improvements in the deployment of Openbravo ERP compared to the community appliance, but provides significant advantages to Professional Edition Subscribers managing the instance, as the steps went down to these:

1. Download the last backup from the production environment
2. Upload it to each 3 servers
3. In each server click on Restore that backup.

As you can see, the Openbravo Cloud Appliance (manual) does not only allow you to spend more effectively your time maintaining your instance, but also avoids unexpected errors and problems in these critical manual tasks.

In the end, the replication of the original environment in 3 (counting that they all use the Professional Edition) was done in less than 4 hours.

Skinning Openbravo ERP in 5 minutes !!

Hi,

Skinning Openbravo ERP to fit a company's corporate colors is usually a required task in an implementation project. Let me show you a few easy steps to start creating your new skin and seeing the effects from the beginning.

What Im going to do is to create a skin that for now, only changes the user logo in the login page, and the Openbravo logo in the application.

Step 1: Follow the steps to create the folder structure of your new skin module

At the end of this point, the result should be something similar to this.

Step 2: Edit the Openbravo_ERP_250.css file and state that you want both images ( User logo and Openbravo logo ) to be used from inside your module and not for the standard skin.

Note that any other image you want to change ( usually the green colored bars ), should follow the same guidelines as this examples.

Now put the modified images in your folder structure.

Step 3: Create the skin module inside Openbravo ERP

Step 4: Compile, restart tomcat, and see results ;)

Have you made your own skins? Thought it was a difficult task? Think again!

Using Openbravo ERP on the iPad

With the release of the iPad ( http://www.apple.com/ipad/ ) a new range of possibilities can be discovered regarding the ERP mobility world.

See this example about launching a Stock report in Openbravo ERP on an iPad.

See also a Sales invoices dimensional report or Completing a goods receipt in youtube just using a search with the following keywords. openbravo ipad

Let your imagination run wild and ... make it happen!