Open Source Strategies, Inc.

A group of graduate students from the Lancaster University in Lancaster, UK contacted me last year regarding a research project they were doing. They wanted to compare open source and commercial ERP systems for the retail industry and evaluated opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM, openbravo, and Microsoft Dynamics NAV (Navision).

They were kind enough to share their results with us, and you can read it at Opentaps In Retail. I hope you would find it interesting.

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We’ve been working on an integration of the Magento e-commerce platform for opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM, and some of our long-time users have also talked about integrating opentaps with Spree. I took a quick look at both and make some notes about them. Since we’re not developers of or service providers for either one,  and we plan to support integration with both in opentaps, I hope you’ll consider this an unbiased if somewhat “bird’s eye” comparison of Spree vs. Magento.

Spree

Spree is lightweight and easy to use, and the user interface for both the online store and the backend administrative module were quite intuitive. There is a good amount of documentation on the Spree website, and the authors of Spree seem really interested in helping you understand their system and work with it.  Their BSD license is one of the least restrictive open source licenses.   There is an active community around Spree, as evidenced by the Spree extensions available.  Finally, Spree is written in Ruby on Rails, which is a very well-thought out web development frameworks.

Magento

Magento is a much bigger application than Spree.   Its  online store is also very intuitive and easy to use, but it’s altogether more polished and commercial-looking than Spree. The backend administrative applications are bit more complex, though. The free documentation available seems to be just  the Magento wiki, which has a lot of content available but is not as consistent. There are also several books on Magento, ranging from to Magento: Beginner’s Guide to The Definitive Guide to Magento and php/Architect’s Guide to E-Commerce Programming with Magento. (Note: I haven’t read these books yet and can’t give them any recommendations.) Finally, Magento is written in PHP and the code seemed well-organized on first inspection, which means that a good developer should not take too long to get familiar with it.

Magento has a  commercial/open-source licensing model, and the free version is licensed under the OSL 3.0 license. The OSL 3.0 is also a true open source license approved by the Open Source Initiative,  but it is more restrictive than the BSD and the GPL license. (See the GNU Project’s comments about the OSL, for example.)  Still, do not view this as purely negative. If the commercial/open source licensing model can support full-time professional developers to work on Magento’s open source version, then ultimately it would benefit most real end users of the open source Magento  e-commerce platform.

The biggest advantage for Magento, though, seems to be its large number of third party modules available. There are over 1300 add-on modules available for Magento.  (And the opentaps-Magento integration will soon be one of them!)  Although most of these are commercial (as in “for pay”), and many of the free ones are in “beta” status, there still seems to be a lot of stable, free modules available.

How to Choose?

My personal opinion is that this comes down to a decision between Ruby on Rails and PHP. You should ask yourself which one you would prefer to work with and feel more comfortable with. However, keep in mind that while Ruby on Rails has been a very successful web development framework, PHP is simply the most dominant one today.  (See for example O’Reilly’s State of the Computer Book Market and the TIOBE Software Index.)  Therefore, there are many more developers, service providers, and add-on modules for PHP than Ruby. For example, Facebook’s developer API is mainly for PHP.  Until Ruby on Rails comes up with a “killer app” that does something which PHP fundamentally is not well-suited for, I would not expect this to change.

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Easier to Use and Better Looking

• We’ve introduced a new keyword search feature for opentaps, based on Hibernate search, Apache lucene, and Google Web Toolkit
• We’ve also enhanced searching for invoices, payments, accounting transactions, and orders with new fields you can search with
• We think the new look for opentaps applications is a lot better and hope you agree.
• For Java developers, we’ve added support for hibernate caching and Java wrappers for ofbiz services and Java classes for constants to make your code easier to write and easier to maintain.

Try opentaps in the Amazon Cloud

opentaps is now available on Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2).  Watch the “opentaps on Amazon EC2″ video to find out how easy it  can be to set up a pre-installed demo of opentaps in minutes.

Using opentaps with Magento eCommerce

For those of you who would like to use opentaps with the award-winning Magento eCommerce system, the opentaps-Magento integration is now ready for testing.  The Apache OFBiz eCommerce application is still included out of the box with opentaps, and we will be looking at integrating with other shopping cart systems such as Spree, Zencart, and osCommerce as well.

A New Look for opentaps.org

Thanks to the help of Integrating Web, opentaps.org will also soon have a fresh new look.  Here’s an example of what it’ll look like:

opentaps Version 1.4 is Coming!

opentaps 1.4 Release Candidate is now available for download, and opentaps Version 1.4 will be released shortly.

What About the Future?

We’ve already started thinking about opentaps 2.0, which will have a more modular architecture to allow add-on modules written in any framework or language to be loaded and used with opentaps.  We’re also looking at how to leverage the domain driven architecture and Google Web Toolkit to create a new kind of ERP application.  Please give us your feedback and help us build the next generation of enterprise software.

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Eric Qualman’s talk in Atlanta earlier this month got me thinking some more.  I started to play with words: “social media,” “social network,” “networking”…what did it all mean?  Interestingly enough, after a while the words themselves revealed a pattern.  Here are my notes on hotel stationery which I’d like to share with you.

Let me show you with an all-too-LA example:

In the age of television,

• media was how content was transmitted: cable, satellite
• content was the shows
• networks like ABC, NBC, HBO, and ESPN bundled the content and broadcast them over media to viewers, who used
• platforms to view the content.  The most common platform was the TV, and then later VHS (remember those?), DVD’s, TiVO, and now Hulu showed up.
• And networking was the act of gathering up content for distribution.  Power breakfasts at the Peninsula Beverly Hills, next to the old CAA building.

So what does it look like today in the social media world?

Today, we have:

• Media Twitter , Blogger, WordPress, and Facebook
• Content are all the blogs, tweets, videos out there
• Platforms are the PC’s, iPhone’s, Blackberrys, and tablets we’re using to play the content
• And now: networks are still the aggregators of the content.  Google does it with search.  Facebook does it with the friends network.  But anyone can do it in this day and age — even you.  Just start gathering up the content I’ll like and broadcast it on your blog, Facebook page, or Twitter, and I’ll join your network.
• networking with all the bloggers, twitterers, and movie makers (or open source projects) out there.

What Does It All Mean?

We all want to make a big splash by coming up with the next Facebook or iPhone.  But if you look at the history of TV, you’d realize that most of the money was made by the content producer (like Aaron Spelling) or networks (think Ted Turner), not by the providers of media (Adelphia?) or makers of platforms (Zenith.)

I think the same will be true of the new social media world.  Ten years from now, we’ll be glad to have our iPhones and tablets and use Facebook and Twitter, but what makes our lives better day in and day out–and what we will pay for day in and day out–will be great content producers and the networks, big and small, which gather them for us.

What Does This Have to do with Open Source?

Actually, everything.  But let me save that for a future post.

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We have just  made the release candidate for opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM Version 1.4 available, and you can download opentaps 1.4RC1 from SourceForge.  We will also be making an opentaps Amazon EC2 image for this release candidate available shortly.

This release candidate is the final step before the official release of opentaps 1.4, which is expected in the next few weeks, and there should be only limited changes to opentaps 1.4 before its release.  If you have questions or comments about this release, please join us at the opentaps forum on SourceForge.

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I listened to a very good talk last weekend by Eric Qualman, author of Socialnomics, about social media and social networks. Eric had a lot of  good examples about how companies such as JetBlue, McDonald’s, and Burger King are taking advantage of social media to promote their brands and their products.

But what about small businesses? What if you are a startup or a neighborhood business, and you don’t have the millions of potential fans that a JetBlue or McDonald’s would have — not yet anyway?

This is actually a situation we’ve faced ourselves, starting opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM on a shoestring. And looking back, we’ve only been able to do it because we were able to tap into an online social network called “open source,” which is an online collaborative community of software developers that predates Twitter, Facebook, Google — even the Internet itself.

What we’ve learned don’t contradict what Eric and other people have said about social marketing, but there are a few twists I would like to point out:

Join a Bigger Network

When you are small, your network is also small, so you try becoming a prominent part of a larger network, instead of just promoting in your own network. For us, this meant making ourselves known in the larger open source community of software developers and users looking for open source software by releasing our software and our ideas to them.  Fortunately, people liked them.

Network (verb) through the Networks (noun)

Use social networks as an opportunity to network with other people in compatible fields.  For example, we’ve benefitted from associating with other open source software projects, such as Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Funambol, Pentaho, JasperReports, etc.

Be Memorable

Most importantly, be memorable. Be different. Believe it or not, the small business has the advantage here. People are always looking for interesting new things to talk about.  If you are a small business with a memorable product or service, the word will spread a lot faster now than ever before.

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Here’s a new look for opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM:

Tell us if you like it!

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And now for something I’m especially proud of.

We’ve just finished putting together the new keyword search feature for opentaps. Now if you go to opentaps CRM, you’ll see a new keyword search box on the right:

Type in a keyword, click on search, and opentaps will return results from different sections of the CRM application, including accounts, leads, contacts, cases, orders:

And here’s an example of searching for an order by its ID:

The results are returned in a floating panel which shows up on top whatever screen you’re on.  You can click on a result to take you to it, or just close the floating panel to stay in the page you’re already in.

Now Here’s the Best Part

This new keyword search feature is implemented with Apache lucene and hibernate search. What we’ve done is create a separate and modular component in opentaps and loaded  with the Spring framework as a domain under our domain driven architecture:

Each opentaps application then uses the underlying search component to put together its own search services and user interface. For example, opentaps CRM uses the accounts, lead, contact, cases, opportunities, and orders search services from the search domain.

What this also means is that if you want to use a different indexing and search engine, all you have to do is implement the search domain and then plug it into opentaps using this our domain driven architecture.

Anybody out there interested in working with the Google Search Appliance?

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In the previous installment of An Open Source Business, we talked about how to determine if an open source project could also support a successful business. Now let’s look at how to build a successful commercial open-source project.

Before starting your project, ask yourself:
What will make a commercial open source project successful?

Believe it or not, most developers get this question wrong because of two myths about software — and doom years of work before they’re begun.

The Two Myths

Here’s the myth that many commercial software companies have:

“The best software is the one with the most features.  If we could just get more features in our program, we’ll be able to get more customers and topple Microsoft.”

And here’s its equivalent at many open source projects:

“The best open source project is the one with the most people.  If we get more people in our project, we’ll get more contributions and more features, and then we’ll be able to topple Microsoft.”

And What’s Wrong with That?

For commercial software, the number of features is not as important as ease of use.  Sure, I want my software to do what I need–but then that’s it.  Don’t confuse me with all those other screens, menus, and buttons.  I’ve got a life and want to get back to it.

For open source software, the most important thing is having good code.  Every project needs more users and more developers, but without the proper technical foundation to absorb them, an open source project could easily hit a wall.  (I actually wrote about this almost exactly two years ago under “The Limits of Open Source.”)   A successful open source projects must be extensible, stable, and technically interesting — otherwise, who would want to work with your code base?

Now Here’s the Hard Part

If you want to have a successful commercial open source project, you need to do both.  You need to create software that is both easy to use and is technically strong.  It should have enough features to be useful, so that your project could support your business.  Longer term, though, your project — and your business — will succeed only if your software is easy to use and well written.

This may sound like a tough balancing act, but it’s exactly what has worked for opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM.  Sure, our users  are looking for a program with enough features to meet their needs.  But why do they choose opentaps?  Because they find it easy to use, and because they like its strong technical architecture.  This is why we’ve invested so much in giving opentaps a stronger technical infrastructure and making it easier to use — and we’re just getting started.  If you like opentaps now, then just wait — you ain’t seen nothing yet!

In the next installment of “An Open Source Business“, we will look at competitive strategies for an open source project.

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GWT is short for “Google Web Toolkit”, an open source library of tools for building rich web applications using Ajax. We have been working with GWT in opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM for over a year now, and I’d like to give you this example of how GWT really can do.

A long, long time ago…

Almost 4 years ago, we built the first version of opentaps CRM. It had several tabs for all the function of a full-featured CRM application, including leads contacts, accounts, cases, opportunities, etc.   Under each tab we added a “quick widget” to help users do common tasks easily, like entering a lead with basic information:

GWT Made It Better

When we started working with GWT over a year ago, we started by porting these quick widgets to GWT. This was nice, because now you can enter a lead without having to refresh your entire web page. We also updated the find and list forms in opentaps with GWT, so it’s easier to scroll through lists of  data like leads and cases. These are all enhancements which will be part of opentaps 1.4.

But This is What It Can Really Do For You

Looking back, this was a classic example of old thinking with new technology, like the early TV commercials which featured an announcer reading a script in front of a microphone.  (”Folks, it’s So So to tell you about the incredible advantages of the new Such and Such…”)  Sure, now you can see the announcer, but you’re just watching a radio commercial on TV.

What GWT really allows you to do is create “widgets” which can be pasted anywhere, so you don’t have to be tied to the context of the page.  For example, Google adwords is a widget that can be pasted on any web page to serve up ads from Google.

In a similar way, these opentaps CRM quick action widgets don’t have to be tied to just a particular part of opentaps anymore either, because you’re not.  You might be entering some information about a sales opportunity and get a call.  It turns out to be a new prospect.  When you’re done on the phone,  and you shouldn’t have to go look for the Leads tab to enter the new prospect’s information.

And you won’t. As of the next release of opentaps, the quick action widgets have been changed so that they can be put on any page in opentaps CRM. For example, they are all available from the “My Home” page of opentaps CRM:

By default, they are closed, but once you click on the tab bar to open them, you can use them to enter information without leaving the screen you’re on:

They will also remember whether you would like them open or closed, so if you have widgets get you use frequently, they will stay open for you:

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