Open Source Strategies, Inc.

My friend Phil Simon is writing an interesting book called “The New Small” about how today small businesses are taking advantage of emerging technologies. We started talking about how open source software is affecting small businesses.  I realized that open source has made a fundamental shift in the relationship between technology and small businesses.  Instead of being a tool of large enterprises, technology is helping today’s small businesses leapfrog passed their larger competitors, thanks to open source software.

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We have now released opentaps 1.5M1 featuring many of the new enhancements discussed in the last quarterly update for opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM.

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!

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An Easier Way to Set Up opentaps

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…

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Last week I wrote about an easier way to load your organization’s data into opentaps.   Now we also have an easier way for your salespeople to load sales leads into the opentaps CRM module.

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A few months ago, I wrote that our #1 goal for opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM was Easier: “I want opentaps to be easier to use, easier to set up and configure, and easier to customize and build on top of.” As an example of this, let me show you an easier way to load your company’s data into opentaps.

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I didn’t “get” Google Wave when I first tried it.  It wasn’t like any other forum, wiki, or project management software I’ve used before.  (And believe me, I’ve used a lot of them.)  What’s so great about it?

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:

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Thanks to 袁徐磊 (Yuan Xulei) from Tsinghua University and Nanguache.com in Beijing, we now have new Chinese translations for opentaps.  感谢清华大学和南瓜车的袁徐磊捐献的opentaps中文翻译! Here is opentaps CRM in Chinese — 请看中文的opentaps CRM:

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In this edition of the quarterly update, I’m happy to tell you about the:

• 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

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We’ve just launched our first e-commerce site with Magento, and it’s the new opentaps online video store.

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?

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I’m seeing a steady stream of jobs and projects for opentaps from many different sources.  I will try to re-tweet them as I see them, so if you are an opentaps service provider, please subscribe to us on twitter at http://twitter.com/opentaps.

Filed under: About Social Media, About opentaps | 2 Comments →