Jobs, Jobs, Jobs come from Small Business

Things are certainly changing.  Crowd Funding is changing the way small businesses get funded.  We @O4BO have just started a Crowd Funding campaign with http://search.voltcrowd.com/campaign/detail/507 some of the focus of Volt Crowd is the impact on creating Jobs...I think this is great and should generate a lot of interest.

Our business which is bringing the low cost high value solutions for Accounting, Inventory, Customer Relatoinship Management, Web Content Management, that will all help small businesses run more efficiently and save money at the same time.  This translates almost directly to a better bottom line and fast growth for our small business subscribers which if you follow the trend leads to more jobs.

In the past the VC community was focused on those startups that will rapidly grow past the small business status to medium to large scale businesses where they could reap the return on their investments quickly.  Lately they are moving away from the high risk high payoff ventures and that is opening the door to Angels and Crowd Funding, both of which focus bringing ventures to individuals for investment in one way or another.

For our Contributors, we bring really high value low cost perks to the equation.  We start with prices that are less than 50% of online solutions from SalesForce or NetSuite with even more features and value than either of them.

We also serve individual startups...those individuals that want to start a business and need a web site, and CRM so they can start selling their goods or services at the absolute lowest cost.  One of our perks is a $10 contribution, that will give you a real start and as you grow you can use our other services as you need them.

New Partner Tangent Business Solutions

We at @O4BO welcome Tangent Business Solutions to our list of partners. The Business Process Outsourcing industry in the Philippines is one of the most important and we believe the perfect synergy with our subscribers.

Tangent is the professional support services partner of choice for Full-Cycle Finance 
and Accounting, Statutory Requirements Compliance, Business Process Improvements, and other key Business Support Services. They also provide critical assistance in incorporation and business registrations(in the Philippines), including business terminations, and may likewise be engaged for technical training in QuickBooks, MYOB and other industry-standard Accounting Systems such as OpenBravo. With their team of experienced professionals, they offer you more than reliable support and advisory services. They give you peace of mind. So you can give your core business the focus it deserves. 

Volt Crowd - Help us help you

We at @O4BO have started a campaign that will help us help you and other small businesses.  We are using the excellent folks at Volt Crowd to manage that campaign.  You can see it at http://search.voltcrowd.com/campaign/detail/507

The way it works is that if you contribute to the campaign through Volt Crowd, you get perks, and those perks are designed to give you the contributor an even greater value in our Software as a Service on ERP, CRM, BI and Portal.

You can see the huge discounts on our services, so help us help you with world class software for very little money.

SaaS and Security

One of the most often cited reasons that companies of any size say they don't use Software as a Service (SaaS) providers like O4BO is security.  We understand that concern and have taken significant steps to ensure their security.  One is our partner nCircle (http://www.ncircle.com/).

nCircle's solutions are engineered to work seamlessly in the virtual and cloud environment. This enables both managed security services and business application partners to deliver comprehensive vulnerability and compliance risk assessments in any mix of Cloud, SaaS and on premise configurations.

This is almost completely in alignment withO4BO as we are running on the IBM Smart Cloud Enterprise (http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/en/cloud-enterprise/), we are offering six applications as and integrated SaaS solution, and with Mule ESB we extend that integration to on premise applications and data.   That is I would say an unprecedented synergy, not just a product offering (although we will happily sell nCircle to you whether you subscribe to all our applications or not).

If you are concerned about Security in any SaaS solution, just ask what they do for security?  If you find one that has addressed it better than we have, go for it, if not, welcome aboard.

Openbravo 3 Maintenance Pack (MP)

Every month, Openbravo creates, packages, QA tests, documents, and releases an official Openbravo 3 Maintenance Pack (MP), which your O4BO System Administrator installs into your ERP instance, MP16 is now available in 'QA Approved' maturity status.

Key new features

MP16 contains these key new features:

• Improvements in definition of Bank Account information: Bank Account section of the Financial Account is unified with the Bank Account tab of the Business Partner window, exposing fields that allow entry of the account in the international format.  The ability to automate how the account number is displayed has been added via a new Bank Account Format field.
• Write-off limit: Ability to define a write-off amount limit, per financial account
• Enhancements in Asset Management: Depreciation flag in asset group: Depreciation can now be specified at the asset group level.
• Enhancements in Asset Management: Static assets in tree: An asset can be defined as static, which prevents you from being able to move it within the asset tree.
• Read only exchange rate and amount: You can now turn off the ability to edit the exchange rate via a preference.

Defect corrections  

MP16 contains 159 defect corrections, listed here.           

Above, we've just pulled together the highlights.  Here are the complete release notes for this monthly Maintenance Pack.  

SOA What's up Doc?

Anyone that knows me and many that have hired me, know that I have been preaching a Service Oriented Architecture since well before that phrase was coined. Back in the 1990s I called it a Loosely Coupled Component Framework. At O4BO a Service Oriented Architecture is alive and well. All our applications either have or we are adding web services accessors. We have integrated Mule ESB and will be expanding that. We will be migrating all our applications to DB2 PureXML with its “Universal Services” where DB2 publishes REST or SOAP web services to any PureXML table. Our Liferay Portal leverages REST and JSF in the Portlets we are creating. All our Applications are Truly Multi-Tenant and Truly Integrated such that a single transaction can be applied across systems in a tenant specific workflow.

That's where we are today, and while we are working to enhance literally all of that, we are also looking over the horizon and I wanted to share some of that with you.

With all the applications we have integrated, and can integrate with Mule ESB, we foresee that some of our subscribers may want something different. Not all companies are alike and not all systems can handle those differences without customization. So O4BO will be working with our partners to do per tenant customizations, situational applications, mashups, and orchestration of workflows and even whole new applications that are designed and developed on the O4BO platform with NOTHING to install or maintain (except your monthly subscription payments please).

Here is a sampling:

• You will be able to write your own Mule workflow, upload it to our mule server and run it, just for your business, and it can integrate data and transactions with your existing/legacy applications or trading partners.
• You will be able to write jBPM workflows that can be uploaded and executed as part of either our existing workflows (we will be publishing the APIs), or your own Mule application above.
• If you have an application you developed in Spring (MVC or JSF) you will be able to deploy it and run it as part of your subscription (for a very small hosting fee).
• We have modified Spring MVC and Spring JSF to make the execution of and mapping of events completely dynamic and tenant specific. That means that any application running in our environment can be tailored to meet the needs of our customers not by changing application code but by changing the event handling within the applications themselves (white paper coming). This new capability will be called O4Spring...watch for it before Spring.
• The same capabilities of O4Spring will be extended to include any MVC based application.
• Lastly, we will be integrating Wavemaker, and with it you will be able to write your own sophisticated situational and entirely new applications from scratch right in your O4BO Portal.

When we say, “Not one size fits all” we mean it.

Two new OpenBravo Partners

We are pleased to announce two new @O4BO Partners, Ewota and Eintel. You can see more on our partners page at http://www.open4businessonline.com/partners

This is a significant event for O4BO because it solidifies our support for OpenBravo for those of our subscribers that have or wish to have OpenBravo Enterprise Edition. With Ewota and in our most recent O4BO internationalization of our web site, we get high quality support for our Chinese speaking subscribers! With Eintel we get the OpenBravo partner of the year for the English speaking subscribers.

Welcome aboard and thanks for your support.

Mike Oliver
Founder, O4BO

Mobile Computing

To say O4BO was designed for Mobile would be wrong.  O4BO selected its suite of applications partly because they were Mobile capable, as simple as that.  However as the most recent video from OpenBravo shows, our selection of OpenBravo for our suite brings powerful mobile access to our customers.  All the other applications have similar support for mobile computer.  This video from Liferay shows how documents managed by Literary can be synced with your mobile devices automatically.

Sugar CRM also iis adding Mobile support.  This video from Sugar CRM is a presentation showing that capability in Beta a few months ago.

Of course you should not be surprise that this video from Pentaho, shows its Mobile BI Server.

By now you probably already know that O4BO offers the only online Small Business Suite of applications for ERP, CRM, Collaboration, Web Content Management, Business Intelligence and Analytics, and more based entirely on Open Source software.  I hope these videos also inform you as to our Mobile capabilities. Combined into one integrated solution, we think we compete nicely with ANY online software suite.