In October this year, I'll be visiting the US and Canada for some conferences and a wedding. The first event will be xTupleCon 2014 in Norfolk, Virginia . xTuple makes the popular open source accounting and CRM suite PostBooks ®. The event kicks off with a keynote from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak on the evening of October 14. On October 16, I'll be making a presentation about how...
xTuple's Collective Brainpower Blog
Set to start next week with a haxTuple kick-off webinar , our open source developer contest is already igniting the xTuple community. Although those competitors in the bug-squashing derby have to wait until August 6 to start, Juliana Louback [GitHub] , a software engineer from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, has begun working on her entry for the Mobile Web extension portion of the competition. She's...
Next month we're inviting developers worldwide to our company’s 30-day open source developer competition, haxTuple 2014. Prizes include a genuine Google Glass, mobile warehouse barcode scanner, geeky gear, and a chance to meet Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak!
As an open-source company, we've long known that our community is our secret weapon. haxTuple is an event that helps focus and...
We're happy to hear that NetSuite is finally thinking about rewriting their application in HTML5. In other words, they're working towards a mobile-ready design. This is a good step forward for them, and it's the same insight that we had three years ago when we started in on our web product.
The benefit of HTML5 is that it allows you to write a single application for the web, and have...
One of the great misunderstandings about the new xTuple web client is that its primary purpose in life is to provide an interface for mobile devices. This may surprise people, but that was never the primary reason for its creation. In fact, we expect more people to use it on laptop and PC environments than on mobile devices. It has been labeled the “Mobile” client entirely for marketing...
To be more specific ... the question we would like help answering is would xTuple be better off changing the CPAL license on its core PostBooks project to the GPL license, or an extremely permissive license like BSD or MIT?
Anyone who works with open source software knows that one of the most-discussed aspects of an open source project is its license. The license of a project you...
Setting up enterprise software can be complicated, especially considering all the unknown variables that can exist in different operating systems and with software installed on that operating system. At xTuple, we've determined the best way to ensure a successful and consistent setup is to make sure every installation is configured the same way, regardless of the local operating system. The...
A couple of years ago, it occurred to me it might be possible to compare open source ERPs, ranking them not by total number of downloads (a number which is easily skewed and/or misinterpreted) but instead by measuring how responsive we are to our respective communities. To get a reliable unit for measuring responsiveness, I decided to focus on bug reports. I liked bug reports because a) they...
We've been hearing a lot from partners and users who want to get their hands on our web/mobile platform. This new framework makes it easy to write extensions in pure javascript onto our core code to customize the end-user experience or integrate with other services.
But you have to know where to start! That's why we've written a three-part tutorial on how to write an extension in our...
UPDATE: Feature Mob 2 is SOLD OUT
Mobile Web / Pentaho Business Intelligence "thank you" gift added!
In late August 2013, I announced our Feature Mob 2 , our second generation program of building out features by crowd-sourcing development of xTuple PostBooks®.
The results to date have been exceptional — we've nearly reached our goal, and in record time. But some of...
UPDATE: Some weeks ago, I innocently posted a blog about my friend who used the Kickstarter crowd-funding platform to raise money to make a feature film based on the Veronica Mars TV show. It was enormously successful — they were hoping to raise $2 million, but finished with almost three times that amount, from over 91,000 individual backers. As they say in the movies, principal photography on...
Well, we've moved our code anyway. Over the course of the last couple months we've been consolidating our code base, which was scattered in a variety of places, into GitHub . You can now find the code for all of xTuple's projects here: https://github.com/xtuple
This change means that we are no longer using SVN for any of our code management, it's all git now. We're actually quite...
The 2013 "Future of Open Source Survey" of more than 800 open-source-savvy business professionals revealed that the highest-ranking and overall important open-source trend in the next two to three years is growth of open-source knowledge and culture in academia. Not the desktop, the cloud, or even what's going on at Microsoft! Why?
Excerpted from an article by Steven J. Vaughan-...
If you've been around xTuple for a while, you probably used our Hosted Demo service at one point. While you've always been able to download the xTuple client, and set up your own PostBooks® database locally, many people have found it helpful to use the same client to connect to a hosted instance of their own xTuple Enterprise database. We're pleased to announce the successor to that program —...
I wanted to share the great news with the community as ProjectLibre is being recognized as challenging Microsoft Project's dominance, here is the interview . I spoke with OpenSource.com about ProjectLibre and the impact our community/solution is having in the marketplace. It is amazing to be part of a major wave of open source success. We love to see the success of Apache OpenOffice and...
UPDATE: This information is now outdated and is no longer supported. Please visit xTuple Forums for up-to-date discussion.
A new Advanced Purchasing Authorizations extension package has just been released.
The Advanced Purchasing Authorization package adds comprehensive purchasing limits to the xTuple system and prevents the release and printing of purchase orders unless the user releasing the PO has sufficient authority to release those orders. Purchasing Authorizations are set up as a matrix of...
As developers of business software, it is a core practice for us to "eat our own dogfood," which means using xTuple ERP software to run our own business. Usually we do a very good job of this, but sometimes we hit a roadblock. Ever since the Enhanced Commissions package came out, over a year ago, we have been dying to use it to manage our own sales commissions, but it was missing a key feature...
“PostBooks® would be perfect if…”
If the Veronica Mars Movie Project and an 89 year old grandma with her flowered "Happy Canes" can do it, then the xTuple PostBooks® community can rise to the occasion and meet CEO Ned Lilly's challenge to create Kickstarter's first ERP project .
What feature do you need? Please continue to add your request to xTuple’s Kickstarter here (...
I have a good friend who was a producer of the cult TV show " Veronica Mars " from 2004-2007. Recently, the creative team behind that show made Internet history in an interesting way — they partnered with the website Kickstarter, a resource for crowdsourced fund-raising, to raise millions of dollars to underwrite production of a "Veronica Mars" feature film. As of this writing, over 50,000...