SME-in-a-Box

opentaps is an ERP and CRM suite, including e-commerce, inventory, warehouse, order, customer management, general ledger, MRP, and POS.It is built on top of several components, including Apache Geronimo, Tomcat, and OFBiz

It also has business intellgence components built on Pentaho and JasperReports.

PostBooks from xTuple is a fully-integrated ERP, RM, and accounting system for small to midsized businesses. It uses a Qt interface and runs on several platforms, including Linux, Windows, and Mac.

Postbooks includes the following modules:

• Accounting (general ledger, accounts receivable and payable, bank reconciliation, financial reporting)
• Sales (quotes, order entry, sales reporting, shipping)
• CRM (universal address book, incident management, opportunity management, to-do lists, project management)
• Purchasing (purchase orders, receiving, vendor reporting)
• Product Definition (items, infinite-level bills of material)
• Inventory (multiple locations, other advanced warehouse features)
• Light Manufacturing (work orders, strong support for make-to-order)
• OpenRPT open source report writer

When you talk about Enterprise Resource Planning, what immediately comes to mind are the bellwether packages such as SAP or Oracle Applications. You may not hear as much about open source ERP applications, the probable reasons being: 1) it costs money to develop big ERP applications; and 2) it’s risky to entrust your business to a “free” product.

However, applications that hit right into the core of the business processes are a growing need, and open source is struggling to meet that. There are several that actually attempt to meet the demand.

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The folks at WordPress have just released version 2.5 of the popular blog publishing platform. The release happened on March 29, 2008, not too long since the 2.3.3 upgrade.

This latest version of WordPress incorporates several improvements. According to Matt Mullenweg: “multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.”

Visibly, what this translates to is improvements in the administration screen, which is significantly different from past editions.

This web site uses WordPress. It’s intuitive and easy to use, with hundreds of free and attractive templates to customize the look and feel of the site. If you’re a business contemplating on running a web site, WordPress is a good way to go.