The world of business applications is undergoing some radical changes. No,
the core business applications like ERP, CRM, SCM, etc are not going away
anywhere. In fact, the Open Source world has been very active in churning out
lots of business apps. The latest count on sourceforge.net revealed 374
different Open Source ERP projects.
So apart from Open Source ERP, the world of business apps will continue to
thrive and gain more importance amongst enterprises, and there are many
interesting trends taking shape to suggest that.
The impact of these trends will be felt by everyone in the organization,
right from end-users to the IT department, from the top management to even
external stake holders like customers, suppliers, and partners. But before we
can understand and fully appreciate these trends, it's important to know the
challenges they'll overcome for the various stake holders.
Let's start with users. One of the biggest challenges when introducing a new
business application to users is to have them accept it and eventually train
them to use it. The reasons for this are obvious. Users are quite used to
working with their existing set of applications and don't want to be moved out
of their comfort zones.
Most of them use common productivity tools like office suites, email clients,
and web browsers to manage their data. The moment something new comes along,
resistance to accept it is only natural. Plus of course, there are the hassles
of switching between so many different applications.
“Something is needed to minimize the learning curve of new applications for
users.”
For the CIO and his team, part of the challenge stems from users' resistance
to change. They first have to convince users about using a new application and
its benefits, and then train them on it. After this come the challenges of
managing and maintaining the application, ensuring that it's always updated with
the latest security patches, and keeping it tuned to give optimal performance.
Every time a new application is introduced, the cycle starts all over again.
As more applications get added, multiple islands of data start forming, and the
management says the dreaded 'I' word to the CIO and his team-Integrate. The hunt
then begins to find the best and least disruptive way to integrate so many
enterprise applications.
“Something is needed to reduce the management headaches and make enterprise
application integration smoother.”
The top management is busy driving the business forward. With rising
competition and ever more demanding customers, they need something that will
give them a 360 degree view of their organization. It should be able to show
them their company's performance data so that they can take timely and accurate
decisions.
“Something is needed to help management gain insights into its company's
performance.”
Finally, the organization faces many challenges while dealing with external
stake holders as well. Ensuring timely delivery of raw material and dispatch of
finished goods to the customers is a challenge as there are many manual
processes involved. These processes can be automated if an organization can
integrate some of its business applications with those of its customers and
partners.
“Something is needed to speed up communication between an organization and
its external stake holders.“
In this story, we'll take you through the key trends that would help meet the
challenges described above. So in the pages to follow, we've explained these
trends in detail along with hands-on examples and illustrations wherever
possible. We sure hope that these new trends will help your organization make
the best of your business apps in the new year. Wish you a great one!
Office suites are the most widely used applications across all enterprises.
What makes them popular is their ease of use. You don't need any prior expertise
or a formal training to get started on them. Compare this to an enterprise
business application, like ERP or CRM, or even a banking application for that
matter. They are complex and require plenty of training to be used.
You can enter the path for Reports Library in the File name box. The Excel Services option can be used to set the sheets to be displayed on Dashboard |
What if these two worlds could meet and be integrated? What if the backend
business applications joined hands with the front end office applications? This
is one trend that's really catching up. Applications of an office suite such as
MS Office have an easy to use interface, making it an apt front end for complex
business applications.
Key benefits
This trend actually makes sense due to many reasons. For one, it reduces the
learning curve required for training users on new applications. Since they're
working on a familiar front-end, they would require lesser time to learn how to
use it as a front-end to a business application.
It would also increase employee productivity. Instead of wasting time in
toggling between an ERP, CRM application, they would continue to use Word,
Excel, or some other similar application to access the back-end business apps.
There are already some ready examples available of this. Excel for instance,
can be used as an interface for analyzing reports generated by an ERP or CRM
application. Microsoft's Outlook calendar can be used to report time in a SAP
application.
Some examples
Many things are happening to make the integration of office suites with
back-end business applications a reality. Microsoft for instance has joined
hands with SAP to provide one such solution. It's a solution called DUET, which
is aimed at making MS Office as the front end for SAP's ERP and CRM offerings.
Likewise, Microsoft's SharePoint Server is another application that can be
integrated with many others. Let's first look at SharePoint, and how to
integrate other applications into its dashboard.Subsequently, we'll explain DUET
in more detail.
Integrating Excel worksheet to Dashboard with SharePoint Server
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides integrated enterprise-class
capabilities like portal, BI, collaboration, etc that can help improve
organizational effectiveness by connecting people, processes, and information
across the boundaries, be it geographical or an organization's functional
boundaries.
SharePoint Server 2007 provides several ways for collaboration among an
enterprises' employees.
One of them is through content management and distribution.
Under this the employees can publish and share their documents. Using the
SharePoint's dashboard on a webpage, an author can also integrate an Excel
worksheet on the dashboard of a webpage.
Through this feature the author of the webpage would be able to serve his
report from a central location to a team, department, or the whole organization
whereby it can be viewed and tracked for progress or other performance metrics.
This worksheet could be used to display just a snapshot of the report or as a
whole. Other users with appropriate permissions can not only view but also
modify the worksheet.
In the following article we will see how a Microsoft Excel 2007 worksheet can
be added to the dashboard of a webpage on Office SharePoint Server 2007. The
condition of adding a worksheet to a dashboard is that it can only be done with
Microsoft Office Excel 2007 as only it has the support for publishing using
Excel Services.
Saving an Excel workbook to SharePoint
A workbook can be uploaded directly from the Upload button on the SharePoint
site, but it's advisable that you publish your Excel workbook by using Excel
Services. To publish your workbook using Excel Services, select Publish option
from the main Office Menu and then opt for Excel Services under Distribute the
document.
On the File name box, give the path to the server along with the file name.
In our case it's the path to the Reports Library in the Reports Center site.
Also in this dialog box select the button Excel Services Option, and in the
following Window select the portion of the workbook that has to be displayed
within the dashboard area.
After saving this setting, select the Document Type as Report from Choose
Document Type dialog box. Finally select OK to publish the workbook and save
that in the SharePoint document library.
Creating a Dashboard
Once you have installedSharePoint Server, you can create Web pages for your
site and also put up documents for sharing. To add a dashboard to a webpage, you
can use the Dashboard Page Template that is provided in the Report Center. A
dashboard can be created by anyone having appropriate permissions. Once you have
logged into the server, you can have access to the Report Center from the
top-panel navigation bar.
The Reports page shows the attached Excel spreadsheet in the Demo Dashboard page of the main users website |
Here click on the Reports tab that opens up the
Reports Center page. To add a dashboard that will be having an Excel
snapshot for displaying you have to click on the drop-down menu of Site Actions
button and from the list select the Create Dashboard option. On the New
Dashboard page fill up the form by providing the file name. This file name will
be used as a pointing address to the webpage.
Select the suitable dashboard layout depending on how many worksheets you
intend to display on that particular webpage. The webpage containing the
dashboard gets created. The place where Excel worksheet has to be displayed, we
get an option of importing the worksheet and this pane is named as Excel Web
Access. By clicking on the hyperlink 'Click to open the tool pane', the webpage
is converted into the edit interface where you can redesign the layout and also
select the worksheet that you intend to display on the dashboard.
From the properties pane of Excel Web Access pane, you can select the Excel
workbook from the Reports Library and also set the rows and columns that would
be displayed on the dashboard. Once done with the process, you can Check-In the
document to save the changes and also use the Publish button to see the
dashboard of the webpage.
Onto a dashboard, along with Excel workbook an author can also display the
KPIs for measuring the organization's goal progress.
DUET: A Collaborative Effort between Microsoft and SAP |
||
One live example of integration of on office suite with business applications is DUET. The solution was launched this year and since then, it has been deployed in many enterprises.
A few scenarios that are possible with DUET 1. Time Management: Use MS Office Outlook 2. Budget Monitoring: Helps managers receive 3. Organizational Management and leave A few months ago, DUET also included support DUET promises to bring plenty of key
Implementation of DUET is probably the only |
Traditionally, enterprises have been purchasing or developing their own
software applications, running them on their infrastructure and performing the
necessary tasks of maintaining the application and doing necessary upgrades for
it. But now this traditional approach has been changed. Enterprises are
accepting business models such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), whereby they
need not buy and install expensive application packages. They rather access and
use the remotely hosted applications.
SaaS isn't a new concept. It's just an improved version of application
hosting, previously known as Application Service Providers (ASP) which came with
a bang a few years ago, but left without a sound. The SaaS business model, like
its predecessor ASP, is based on software distribution model where a software
vendor or service provider hosts the business application software and makes it
available to its customers over a network. The network in case of SaaS is
Internet. One of the major obstacles that had been removed from the path for
SaaS is the availability of bandwidth to the masses and that too at a lower
price.
The availability of bandwidth has favored the SaaS movement. Today, one can
avail everything from online Office suites to Web OSes, and enterprise business
applications such as ERP and CRM using the SaaS model.
How SaaS apps benefit enterprises
SaaS allows enterprises to access functionalities of software applications at a
lower cost with no investments, in either software or hardware. The enterprises
can adopt the SaaS-based business applications to cut down on capital investment
that would have been incurred while setting up those applications to run from
their own premises.
With SaaS, the enterprises need not bother about costs of licensing and
purchasing application packages. Since the SaaS application vendor takes up the
task of setting up the necessary infrastructure that will be needed to host the
application the enterprises save this capital investment which can be diverted
toward operations.
With SaaS-based applications, the complexities involved with the installation
and implementation of the application and corresponding hardware requirements,
IT manpower for maintaining such applications, maintenance hassles, and
down-time, are worries of past for an enterprise. This way an enterprise can
save cost that would have otherwise been incurred toward application's
licensing, implementation, and its training. The only thing that an enterprise
user now requires is to access these SaaS-based business apps in an Internet
connection and a Web browser.
For an enterprise, the benefits of adopting SaaS-based business applications
is not just cost savings, SaaS apps also leverage mobility to their employees.
The pervasive Internet connectivity and the penetration of notebooks and mobile
devices have made it possible for an employee to work from home or even while
traveling.
A SaaS-based business app allows employees to access their business
applications from a Web browser anywhere and anytime. Also as the business apps
are already installed, they just need to be configured as per the client's
requirement. This results in faster deployment of the application which has also
termed the SaaS applications as 'Instant-On' applications. Thus an enterprise
which has opened up a new branch office in another city can extend the user
subscription from the SaaS vendor and get the business applications up and
running for the new office in no time.
Collaboration and resource sharing have been two aspects that Web 2.0 has
emphasized upon. These days SaaS vendors are following the roadmap of Web 2.0
whereby their applications would be interactive and user-friendly along with the
facility for collaboration and resource sharing among the users of the
application. Keeping this in perspective the new-age SaaS applications are not
merely a standalone business functionality solution, but a solution that
provides full e-business functionality by integrating business applications like
CRM, workflow, SCM along with services like web-mail, chat/IM, and online
support.
With such an application an online business environment can be achieved
whereby users can interact among themselves and also share information while
being able to access business applications (like CRM, SCM) that they use for
their work. These SaaS applications facilitate all these services from within a
Web browser. The enterprises just have to subscribe to the service; they can
even customize the services offered by SaaS vendor to fit their requirements.
Many enterprise business app providers have also jumped upon the SaaS
bandwagon by looking at the growth prospective. The likes of Microsoft and
Oracle have already started their SaaS initiative products and services.
Microsoft this year announced their own SaaS initiative plans by providing
hosted services of Microsoft Exchange server and SharePoint software. Doing this
will allow organizations to use the SharePoint's collaborative applications and
Exchange Server's mail functionalities while saving on the cost of
infrastructure needed to deploy these applications and also on their licensing
and maintenance costs.
Thanks to one of the leading SaaS-based CRM vendor 'SalesForce.com;' now an
enterprise can implement CRM application for its offices with just a few clicks
and employees can access it over the Internet using a Web browser. Similarly,
WorkACE is a Web 2.0 based SaaS solution that offers a whole online business
environment.
Benefits of SaaS Model v/s Traditional Model |
||
Traditional Software Model |
SaaS SoftwareModel |
|
Investment Costs | l Application licensing costs l Hardware & Installation Costs l Maintenance Charges |
l Subscription-based service l Initial cost up to 50% less than licensed App |
Implementation Time | 6—18 months duration` |
Within Days |
Upgrade Frequency` | Once per 12—18 months |
Frequently, 3—4 times a year |
Maintenance Fees | Up to 20% of the license cost |
None |
IT Manpower and Infrastructure | Increases TCO depending on manpower expertise required |
Handled by vendor |
WorkACE |
WorkACE is a SaaS based Business Process
|
When you create a new Division (Business Unit) in WorkACE, eleven most common departments are auto created |
This can actually be a drawback for the
system in some cases. Being a browser based SaaS model application, it has
great usability on thin clients. An organization can save on deployment
costs by replacing all workstations where WorkACE is going to be used, with
thin clients. However, most thin clients don't support app installation and
come with either IE or some other browser instead of FireFox. In such a case
the system might not even work.
If you choose the SaaS model (which we have reviewed this time), then
deployment is just a matter of minutes. All you have to do is purchase
WorkACE for users whom you want to give access to the system. Once deployed,
you have to create Divisions (essentially a business unit) and Departments
in the system, according to your business needs.
The system makes this process simpler by creating the common departments
automatically, the moment you create a new Division. Around eleven
departments such as HR, R&D, IT Systems, Sales, Marketing, Purchase, etc are
auto created. As soon as customization as per your business needs is over,
start using the software.
Pricing
and purchase
The SaaS model of WorkACE can be purchased from http://workace.com and costs
you around USD9.95 per user per month, which comes to around Rs 400. Along
with this you can get licenses for 5 to unlimited number of users, unlimited
eFacility, 150MB storage space per user and 1GB data transfer per user per
month. The system uses Google to checkout online transactions and takes
around 15 minutes to register.
However, the price of the Enterprise Edition, which is essentially a
premises installation, is not disclosed. You can write to ghq@qxsystems.com
for more information.
Today enterprises demand data immediacy, accuracy and security from one end
of the business process to another. But since most have monolithic applications
running on disparate, unconnected systems, this demand seems very difficult to
meet. Monolithic applications such as ERP, CRM or SCM had efficiently resolved
productivity and control issues over their functional domains.
But when it comes to collaboration and resource sharing amongst different
departments, there was a wide chasm as business processes of one application
couldn't communicate with some other app's processes. This was because these
discrete applications did not follow or implement open standards like SOAP or
XML, which facilitate inter-platform communication.
Therefore, there was a need for a seamless system for enterprises, where they
would be able to shift their focus and resources from maintaining separate
applications to adopting an end-to-end business process based on customer
service.
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has come out as an answer to the demands
of today's fast-moving, business-critical environments.
SOA has made it possible for an organization to streamline communication
across disparate business applications such as ERP, CRM or SCM.
It's a conceptual framework that enables enterprises to weave business
processes with IT infrastructure, by integrating data and business logic of
their disparate applications. And as the enterprises race toward SOA
implementation for optimizing business processes and streamlining communications
across various department-based applications, the software application vendors
have started their own initiatives for SOA.
On the one hand, they are providing platform for SOA based business
architecture and on the other, they are making business applications that are
SOA compliant.
Benefits of SOA
The benefits of an SOA based business environment are multifarious. The SOA
approach is generally focused on business processes. This means by integrating
business processes, an enterprise can achieve cost-reduction, service re-use and
faster response to business needs.
By integrating loosely-coupled business processes, that allows one discrete
application to communicate with the other, a bridge can be achieved that
eliminates the time lag for information flow amongst applications.
Using SOA, an enterprise would be able to keep its investments in existing
legacy systems. This way an enterprise would be able to adopt and integrate
their legacy apps with newer applications, without having to make their old
legacy systems and data redundant. So they can build a flexible and
standards-based software foundation for the future.
SOA enabling apps
SOA based business models are available from almost all major software solutions
providers. The likes of Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, IBM and BEA, all have their own
initiatives for SOA as a business integration solution. Similarly, business
application vendors have started providing solution packages that are compliant
with SOA standards.
With an SOA compliant business application, an organization can integrate
their legacy systems with these apps over an SOA enabling platform. IBM's Lotus
Notes and Domino 8 is a suite of software that can play a key role in an
organization's plan for SOA implementation. They provide seamless integration
among different desktop utility applications and also enhance collaboration.
On the other hand to integrate business applications with ERP, SAP has
provided NetWeaver as an integrating platform.
Microsoft, with their Visual Studio 2008 has provided developers an SOA
standards based development environment on which applications meant for seamless
business activity can be developed.
The adoption of such platforms and development environment for SOA
implementation, gives an organization the flexibility of business services
development by reducing the need to solve the complexity of underlying
infrastructure technologies of applications and their frameworks.
As one can see, SOA is a different way of building and deploying enterprise
applications. It's a complete architecture, which would require some time to
settle in. However once it's done, it would make enterprise application
integration a breeze.
SOA solutions from major vendors |
All major IT solution providers have their own range of SOA products. Here are some of those:
1. Sun Microsystems: The company has released 2. Microsoft: The product line of SOA 3. IBM: The company's SOA Foundation is an 4. BEA: Their SOA product family includes 5. Oracle: The company's SOA suite comprises 6. SAP: Its NetWeaver is a web-based, open |
For any organization, the value of getting reports about its various
performance metrics is extremely critical, as it helps make the right decisions
at the right time. This reporting reflects the status of assets that can include
customer databases, supply chain information, personnel data, manufacturing,
sales and marketing activities, as well as any other source of information
critical for the organization's business operations.
But all these business functionalities have their own data sources, due to
which extracting a report based on over two or more functional areas becomes
complex and a tedious job for the IT department.
Business Intelligence (BI) software steps in here. It allows you to integrate
disparate data sources like supply-chain and customer databases into a coherent
framework for real-time reporting and detailed analysis. Equipped with BI an
organization can have the facility to gain insights into their business or
operations by understanding their company's information assets.
Company watch |
|
Every organization, small or large can benefit from BI. Because of this BI
applications can be found deployed in every other organization. Today BI is no
longer a tool meant for top executives alone. Its usage has trickled to others
in the organization as well, ie the salesforce can also use BI to get data about
their prospective customer leads. This is mainly because BI reporting and
querying has become easier to use. For instance, today BI applications use user
interfaces that represent a familiar spreadsheet like environment, but are
packed with more advanced features.
Decision-makers of an organization have always expected BI applications to
present them the most current information from the data warehouse or from the
operational data in order to evaluate their business plans, product's
performance or consumer behavior and also how to lead business processes.
Business Analytics helps in evaluating such reports generated mainly by the
enterprise's BI system from the data repository.
BA is a tool with which scenario based and predictive analysis could be done
on the information to describe a business opportunity better. Organizations need
such analytics tools that could help to optimize business processes like
identifying best customer, selecting the ideal price, and calculating
demand—supply requirement etc.
A BI application does an overall organizational information retrieval through a central data warehouse which tracks all departmental data stores |
Taking cue from this, now many BI applications have integrated the analytics
facility also along with the reporting.
BI Apps integrating BA tools
The past year saw many significant acquisitions in this space. Many vendors
in the BI domain acquired companies with Business Analytics expertise. The major
news-makers were SAP for its acquisition of Business Objects, and IBM's
acquisition of Cognos. As a result, these BI firms can now offer a complete
solution to the customer, right from reporting to data analysis.The advantage of
integrating BA tools with BI applications is obvious.
BA tools provide dashboard functionalities whereby the KPIs can be tweaked to see their projected outcome |
BI applications are based on pre-determined key-performance metrics and
planning assumptions on which automated reports are generated. Whereas BA tools
are not meant for simple report generation,but rather work and interact on data
from generated reports of BI to do calculative analysis to help in
decision-making processes.
For instance, Business Objects has a BA tool called Xcelsius. With it users
can evaluate BI-generated reports with graphical data representation, which is
easier to interpret, and also conduct on-report business analysis in a
spreadsheet like interface. This helps in execution of business decisions
instantly from the report itself.
This is in stark contrast to the earlier days, where the report generated
from the BI application had to be pulled out onto a spreadsheet and handed to
data analysts for generating business model or for analysis summary.
With such easy to use reporting and analysis tools a business decision maker
can not only query a BI app for a report, but also do predictive analysis on it
to make a business decision out of it. With that he can not only save time but
also make better decision in the competitive business arena.
In addition to distributing the right data for reporting, BI solutions
present that data in visualized format like a graph for ease of understanding.
These tools have options that allow you to create dashboard reports to present
data in various formats like charts or diagrams.
Viewing graphically presented data results in easier and quicker evaluation
of reports. Also this visualized data can be used for doing analytics and
reviewing purposes whereby the scenarios of a change to a particular metric and
its impact can be judged easily. Such dashboard functionality results in ease of
use for the end-user of the BI application.
With the BA tools being integrated into an enterprise's BI solution it has
empowered the organization's employees to make faster and better decisions by
having an accurate view of the organization and the actionable items based on
defined key performance metrics.
Cognos 8 BI |
An enterprise can put a BI solution to greater use by putting it in the hands of a broad range of users and bringing them into the familiar working environment that they use each day. Also the users should be able to query for data easily, be it from their dashboards or even remotely through mobile devices. The new age BI apps are facilitating all this now. Cognos 8 BI is a strategic BI software that lets its users access, view, and interact with reports within Microsoft Excel which users are familiar with. A user can find strategic BI information of the enterprise using Cognos 8 BI application mobile service that caters to an enterprise's mobile workforce on devices like Blackberry. |
So far we have discussed trends that are and will transform the way business
applications will be used in an enterprise. While these are all exciting, they
come at a cost. So if you're on a tight budget, then here's some good news for
you. The Open Source community has started churning out lots of different
business applications, be it ERP, CRM, SCM, web based collaboration, unified
communication, document or content management. You name the application and
you'll find something in the Open Source world.
The demand for Open Source business applications can easily be noticed if one
visits sourceforge.net, where 400+ Open Source ERP solutions are listed.
Obviously not all of them would be useful, but you can figure that out by
looking at which ones have been downloaded the most. For instance, one of them,
Compiere ERP+CRM software has been downloaded millions of times, which clearly
indicates its popularity.
We have also carried around 20 Open Source ERP solutions on this month's DVD
for you to check out. Most Open Source ERP solutions are based on Java, provide
a web-based interface, and require PHP. They do require a RDBMS to work, and
will normally work with PostgreSQL or MySQL. Some will even work with commercial
databases like Oracle.
In the pages to follow, we've explained how to implement one of the ERP
solutions, OpenBravo that we've provided on this month's DVD.
Compiere the Compuntu way
Compiere is one of the most popular Open Source Installation: To run it download the |
Some Open Source ERP Solutions |
|
Solution` |
Features |
Openbravo ERP | Web-based, modules for finance, supply chain, project mgmt, manufacturing & BI |
JFire | Java based ERP, totally customizable, provides ERP + CRM |
jAllinOne | Web application based on Java Swing, OS independent, it facilitates management of warehouse, selling, purchasing, accounting, activity and scheduling. |
Compiere ERP | Browser based, easy installation on Linux or Windows, complete ERP and CRM solution |
Plazma | Java based ERP + CRM solution, OS independent, DB can based on Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Firebird, HSQL |
WebERP | PHP based web ERP for automating accounting system, reports can be emailed as PDFs |
ERP solutions are notorious in being extremely time consuming when deploying.
A standard ERP implementation could take around many months to a year depending
on the complexity of the business processes plans to automate. There are
generally two areas to be taken care of while deploying an ERP solution: the
actual installation of the application; and the business process migration to
the system. Both parts require a good amount of planning and time, making the
deployment of the whole system a very tedious and lengthy process.
While nothing much can be done about the second part, you can reduce the time
taken during the installation and configuration of an ERP app. This will not
only save your total deployment time but also give you more time to plan the
actual task, business process migration. The software is freely downloadable and
follows the Openbravo Public License, which is a derivative of the Mozilla
Public License. You're free to try it out in your organization on your own, or
contact an Openbravo implementation partner to help you. If you have the
necessary inhouse expertise , then you can try it inhouse, else get external
support for it. One such vendor is YourIT-Service. You can reach them at
“http://yourit-service.com”. Let's now see how to deploy it.
Deploying OpenBravo 2.35
The software is available for both Linux and Windows. You can download its
installer directly from the website (www.openbravo.com), or you could even
download its virtual appliance that's would then run from either VMware or XEN.
To create a new workflow in OpenBravo, just go to the Application --> Workflow option and fill in the workflow path from the wizard |
As we want to deploy an ERP solution in less than ten minutes, we'll go the
virtual appliance way. We have also provided the OpenBravo virtual appliance for
VMware with this month's PCQXtreme DVD. The system which you will require to run
the virtual appliance should have at least 1 GB RAM, 20 GB free hard-disk space
and a Pentium D or better processor.
Any OS--Windows XP, 2003 or Linux will work for OpenBravo, as long as you
have VMWare Player or Workstation installed on top of that OS. And of course the
machine should have a network card (preferably a 1000 Mbps card) connected to
the network. For our test, we used a 3.0 GHz dual Xeon processor server with 16
GB RAM and Windows Server 2008 RC0 installed on top of it.
Key Features of OpenBravo |
You shall see the following list of options on the front page of OpenBravo admin interface:
|
Now, depending on the OS installed on the server, you have to download VMWare
player and install it on your machine. We are using VMWare Player and not
Workstation as we are using only free and Open Source applications for this ERP
deployment. You can download VMware player from www.vmware.com/download/
player/.
Once you have downloaded and installed it, extract the Zip file containing
OpenBravo virtual hard disk image. Now run VMware player and select the
extracted .vmhd file and start the virtual machine. It will boot on a Linux
machine in two to five minutes and you should see a banner, “Welcome to
OpenBravo ERP Community Appliance”. Your ERP solution is now fully deployed and
ready to use.
Basic usage
The complete usage and customization of an ERP solution is a vast topic and
we can't cover it in just two pages.
OpenBravo has seven different modules that let you manage everything from
finances to sales, to projects, production, procurement, and your warehouse.
Customizing them as per your organization's requirements would not be feasible
here, as it would require an ERP consultant, we'll not delve into that. Instead,
we'll just tell you how to get started with it, and provide some basic setup and
usage tips.
Login to the terminal
Once you have booted your virtual machine with OpenBravo appliance, you
might need to log in to the appliance for some basic setups. For this, you have
to provide username as 'root' while the password should be blank. Once you login
you should change the root password to something stronger, for security reasons.
To do so run the 'passwd' command and give a new password for the user 'root.'
Accessing the interface
OpenBravo has a web based interface which you can access from across the
network. When you boot the virtual machine with OpenBravo, just below the
welcome line it tells you the IP address on which OpenBravo is running and
accessible. By default it takes the IP from the DHCP server running in your
network.
Once you boot the appliance with VMWare player, you can access the OpenBravo page from any browser over the network |
Now, note down the IP address and go to any machine on the same network and
open up your favorite browser. Here, provide the IP address and a login page
will appear.
Here, provide the username as “OpenBravo” and password as “openbravo”. While
providing the username and the password, mind the case as the system is case
sensitive. Once you've been authenticated, the main configuration page of
OpenBravo will open up.
That's it. Your ERP solution is up. Call an ERP cons- ultant or try
customizing it yourself.