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!

Openbravo ERP 2.50 MP8 released

Hi all,

My name is Asier and I am a consultant at Openbravo. As you know, Openbravo releases a maintenance pack for 2.50 version every month with several bug fixes and a few new features. I would like to comment these releases from a consultant point of view.

Last Friday, October 30th, 2.50MP8 was released. See here the release notes.

The main new feature is the total implementation of the DateTime reference. From now on you will be able to distinguish between Date fields and DateTime fields. In other words, apart from the usual date fields, you can set a field to be able to show not only a date but also hours and minutes. See here the details for this new reference.

One immediate effect is that all audit fields in the ERP will from now on show not only the date but also the exact hour, minutes and seconds when it happened.
So, when delivering support for a customer, you will now know the exact date and time when a register has been created/updated. In my opinion, it is a great help for any task regarding user support.

Another use that you can give to this new reference is to change an existing Date reference to the new DateTime reference, so the user can retrieve more exact data for some date fields in the application. Lets say, for example, you convert OrderedDate column in Sales order window from date reference to DateTime reference because knowing the exact timeframe of the sales order is crucial for your customer.

Just change the column length from 10 to 19 (to be able to get the hour:minutes:seconds) and the column reference from Date to DateTime and compile the window. Here is the result.

The bottom line is that you have another great tool to help you satisfy your customer needs.