opentaps Quarterly Update

opentaps 1.0.0 Released

Last week, we officially released opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM version 1.0.0. This version marks a significant step forward for opentaps. Since the release of 0.9 nearly two years ago, opentaps has matured into a full-featured ERP and CRM suite with role-based applications designed for the sales force, customer service, warehouse, purchasing, and finance and accounting departments. We have greatly improved the usability of opentaps since the earlier versions, created a free online documentation site for it, and built a more solid foundation of automated tests that would allow us to deliver a higher quality product going forward.

A Unique Platform

Most importantly, opentaps has grown into a unique and powerful platform that brings together ERP, CRM, business intelligence, and mobile connectivity. This combination of capabilities surpasses that of almost all other commercial or open source ERP software and allows opentaps to play a much more significant role for your organization: Our flexible data model could be used to capture snapshots of practically any business activity or transaction. The synchronization tools in opentaps could bring data from such diverse sources as mobile phones, Blackberries, Outlook, and web-based e-mail and calendars such as Gmail into opentaps. Finally, the analytical tools that help you tie it all together and turn all that data into knowledge.

Together, this means that opentaps could do much more than automate back-office processes, keep accounting records, or take online orders. It could serve as the common data platform and analytical foundation of your entire organization. With opentaps, you could observe all types of activities -- sales calls, orders, shipments -- as they take place, understand their bottom-line impact, and then act upon that knowledge.

Just the Beginning

The 1.0.0 release of opentaps was a significant milestone in our four-year journey to create free and openly available business applications, but it is also the beginning of a new journey to create a whole new kind of application. Much has happened since when we began: Ajax, Web 2.0, Gmail, social networks, service oriented architectures. Many new and exciting open source projects have also appeared on the scene.

For us at opentaps, this means that we must change, sometimes in fundamental ways, to take advantage of these new resources. First and foremost, we want to make opentaps even easier to use. Under the hood, we will also be upgrading our framework to make it easier to deploy, more scalable and flexible, and more technically robust. Last but not least, we want to tap into the open-source business intelligence capabilities to help you make better business decisions. We have already started on this with the new opentaps analytics application, which is designed to help you sell more effectively by profiling your customers' behavior.

This is an exciting time for us, and I hope you will join us for the next leg of our adventure.