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Open Source: Article

Opportunities for Open Source and Open ERP in Particular

Thanks to its huge community, Open Object produces more then 20 modules a month

The current economic situation has created a difficult time for business, but some industries continue to do well and pose significant opportunities. In IT also some technologies which help industries to drive efficiencies and profitability like Unified Communications, Virtualization and Business Intelligence will provide competitiveness to organizations in the current economic environment. These technologies help to make better and quicker fact based decisions, enables all types of decision making in the organization, Operational, Tactical or Strategic, deployed fast and scales with your requirement and enables decision making at all levels of the organization, Personal, Team or Organisation wide.

Looking at these scenarios Open ERP which is open source management solution has launched its fifth stable version 5.0.0. Open ERP can now answer to all the needs of a business. Open ERP V5 not only provides management functions, but also all functionalities necessary to a SMB, like : a process management by modules, a wiki, a webmail, a Business Intelligence (Cube OLAP), a Document Management System, an eCommerce, an idea box. Emphasis was placed on an extreme simplification of the software for the new users, a carefully designed ergonomy of the web client with, drag and drop, Gantt graph, editable processes, among others, and more then 350 modules for specific sectors and big companies.

This new version comes with a full review of the web site giving access to more then 1500 pages of documentations on business management and a reorganisation of the community sources build upon the Open Object framework.

Unmatched functions
Thanks to its huge community, Open Object produce more then 20 modules a month. The Open Object community it is more then 1000 contributors, 126 development branches in parallel, an average of 400 new functionalities or bugfix per month, one commit every five minutes and functional and technical experts specialized by activity and working in teams.

The rise of Open Object and the diversity of the projects make it an unmatched framework composed of more then 400 modules installable in a few clicks to cover all kinds of need or to simply start, with a simple module, to answer a simple need. Then, you can install other functionalities to come to a fully integrated and automize system.

Open ERP V5 is characterized by the appearance of many functionalities far beyond the perimeter of traditional management. Like dynamic graphs and dashboards, ergonomic calendar views, dynamic Gantt graphs for planning, workflows editors, a fully integrated documentation, a dynamic process view-used for the end-user training, an integrated wiki. An integrated document management system. A Business Intelligence (BI) using a OLAP database. An integrated BPM (management of process). A web portal for clients and suppliers. Improvement of translations (1 translation file by language and module). A touch screen point of sale. A full Ajax webmail. A shared calendar.

The web version of Open ERP includes numerous functions to modify or create your own application an visual view editor, an object editor, a workflow (process) editor, an Open Office integrated report editor, a statistics engine (BI cube).

Furthermore, Open ERP provides some new services to the community :

1500 pages of documentations covering all domains of business management or about the development under Open Object.

Free Softwares overtakes proprietary softwares on the management softwares market. Open ERP V5 takes an unquestionable lead on its larger competitors. Two very thorough studies have compared Open ERP with its proprietary and free competitors, showing an advance of several years for Open ERP: The ERP Open Source white paper by Smile: A study carried out over six months by experts of Smile. Evaluation-Matrix.Com: A community approach with a pragmatic evaluation of the management software company. One should expect exponential growth and shining out comes for Open ERP in the future.

More Stories By Christophe So

Christophe is in charge of promotional activities for Open ERP, and its community. Open ERP has been specifically designed to help businesses improve their performances. Its functional coverage expands to all kinds of different areas. You will get informations with some of the most relevant related characteristics by clicking in the features below.