He received a Post Graduate diploma in Information Technology from British Computer Society and has also received another Post Graduate diploma in Marketing Management from Sri Lanka Institute of Marketing. He is currently studying for his MBA in Marketing Management from Buckinghamshire New University, in the United Kingdom.

He has had extensive experience with SEO/SEM/SMM techniques as a success Search Engine Optimizer for over 4 years now. He also has experience in web design and development. His web development knowledge includes: xHTML, HTML DOM, DHTML, CSS, Java Script, jQuery, XML,AJEX, VB Script, PHP, MySQL, SQL, and Active Server Page(ASP). He has experience in design with using programs such as: Photoshop, CorelDraw, Flash, and Fireworks.

His in house experience with iBCScorp has been Managing/Administration in OpenERP and experience with Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla Content Management Systems. He also has experience with web hosting and web mastering.

iBCScorp is continually expanding its company and is eager to add another qualified and experienced SEO marketing specialist to its team of developers. For questions concerning web development, please call 435-215-4674.

Tonerman

There are many companies that provide cheap products, but after more than 20 years of experience in toner re-manufacturing, their product is high-quality and comes with a satisfaction guarantee.

In order to improve their market penetration in Salt Lake City, Utah areas, and their ability to serve their clients who need printer support services, Toner Man is implementing an ERP system.

ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning.  Many small to medium sized businesses don’t know what ERP is.  Typically a small business manages their business using Quickbooks, paper and a variety of other integrated or un-integrated disparate systems.

Some Examples:

E-commerce example:

If a company had e-commerce and had online orders they might  download orders from the internet and import them into Quickbooks manually.  This is quite common, they might import the orders themselves, or just a monthly or weekly summary of orders so they can account for their online sales.  Information about their customers would then exist partly in Quickbooks and partly in their e-commerce system.

CRM – Sales Management Example:

If a company had sales staff they might manage their sales using paper, an in house CRM ( Customer Relationship Management System) like Act, or a hosted CRM solution like Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, and vtigercrm. The problem they encounter in any of these scenarios eventually is an integration problem. They have to import their customers into their accounting software if it is Peachtree or Quickbooks or whatever any time they get an order they have to copy the clients data into the accounting software.  Further, any time the sales person needs information about a customer – did they pay are things past due is there a hold on the account, did an address or phone number change, have we done business with this account etc. they have to ask the accountant.  Not having this information like an address change may be expensive for the guy who just made a call on that business.

At the end of a year they may have different data for many accounts in each system.  Eventually if the company grows, the manual process breaks down and they have to figure out some way to integrate the systems.

OpenERP is an integrated Solution

By choosing OpenERP to for CRM – Customer Relationship Management, Tonerman is able to be way ahead of the game.  As their company grows and they migrate more of their business process to OpenERP their cost of doing business will decrease or stay the same rather than increasing because their processes will be more automated, they will be using less paper, and repeat entries will be eliminated.  Currently they are doing only CRM, but in the future they may also use the MRP – Manufacture Resource Planning to manage toner manufacturing module, HR-Human Resources Module to manage attendance, accounting to manage the books etc.  There is also e-commerce integration capability with Magento E-commerce.  If they use this with the accounting module for example they wouldn’t have multiple copies of product data – only one.

OpenERP CRM is being implemented with iBCScorp

Internet Business Consulting Services Corporation-iBCScorp.com headquartered in Saint George Utah is an OpenERP implementation and integration company.  They will be providing OpenERP Installation and maintenance.  They will also be training sales staff on OpenERP CRM, and completing the OpenERP Implementation using OpenERP 6.0.

Sales force productivity management

Tonerman looks forward to using OpenERP’s CRM capabilities to manage its sales force and continue to grow its client base, serving its clients across the Wasatch Front and nationwide.

This article will explain the basic steps involved in developing custom OpenERP modules. It is a “Hello World” kind of guideline, therefore you won’t be able to find out all the theories behind OpenObject platform here. Instead you will get all the necessary information to get started with.

Sample module given here is fully functional and tested on OpenERP version 6.0-RC2 (with Web Client on Chrome browser). You will be able to download the complete source code at the end of this article.

Module Description

The sample module we are going to develop is a simple Notebook application. It helps to take down notes and contains just three fields namely “Title”, “Note” and “Date” in its data model.

Module Structure

An OpenERP module consists of some basic elements as explained below. Note that what is explained here is only the basic files required and structure will be more complex in real world applications.

• module_name.py – contains the application logic and database table structure definition.
• __init__.py – init script will load the application’s main python-module and related in application initialization.
• view_name.xml – contains the application interface definition and menu structure.
• __openerp__.py – is the module descriptor file. In previous versions of OpenERP this was known as “__terp__.py”

File Contents

[ notebook.py ]

[python]

from osv import fields, osv
import time

class notebook(osv.osv):
_name = "notebook"
_description = "Simple Notebook"
_columns = {
‘title’ : fields.char(‘Title’, size=30, required=True),
‘note’ : fields.text(‘Note’),
‘note_date’ : fields.date(‘Date’),
}

notebook()

[/python]

Next we import the python module we created in application initialization script.

[ __init__.py ]

[python]

import notebook

[/python]

After that we define the view and menu structure of our module.

[ notebook_view.xml ]

[xml]

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<openerp>
<data>
<record model="ir.ui.view" id="notebook_tree_view">
<field name="name">notebook.tree</field>
<field name="model">notebook</field>
<field name="type">tree</field>
<field name="arch" type="xml">
<tree string="Notebook">
<field name="title"/>
<field name="note"/>
<field name="note_date"/>
</tree>
</field>
</record>

<record model="ir.ui.view" id="notebook_form_view">
<field name="name">notebook.form</field>
<field name="model">notebook</field>
<field name="type">form</field>
<field name="arch" type="xml">
<form string="Notebook">
<field name="title"/>
<field name="note"/>
<field name="note_date"/>
</form>
</field>
</record>

<record model="ir.actions.act_window" id="action_notebook_form">
<field name="name">notebook</field>
<field name="res_model">notebook</field>
</record>

<menuitem name="Notebook" icon="terp-project" id="notebook_menu"/>

<menuitem name="Notes" parent="notebook_menu" id="notebook_menu_mainform" action="action_notebook_form"/>
</data>
</openerp>

[/xml]

Finally create the application descriptor as follows.

[ __openerp__.py ]

[python]

{
"name" : "notebook",
"version" : "0.1",
"author" : "Keerthi Bandara @ iBCScorp",
"website" : "http://www.ibcscorp.com/",
"category" : "Generic Modules/Others",
"depends" : ["base"],
"description" : "Simple demo module",
"init_xml" : ["notebook_view.xml"],
"demo_xml" : [],
"update_xml" : [],
"active": False,
"installable": True
}

[/python]

Packaging and Installing New Module

To prepare your module for installation, you may simply compress the module directory into a zip archive (e.g. notebook.zip).

Once your module archive is ready, you can continue the installation by following the given path below.

1. Login to OpenERP admin view and open “Import Module” screen under “Modules” section in “Administration” area.  Select newly created module archive and click “Import Module” button.

Note: Sometimes on OpenERP V6 (RC2), the message ”Loading..” will be continuously displayed, even though your module is successfully imported. In that case simply close the message window and continue to next step.

2. After importing new module, it will appear under OpenERP “Modules” list. It can be easily located by Searching for the module name. Once you found the module, mark it for installation, then select the check box in front of the module and click “Apply Scheduled Upgrades” link.

Click on “Start update” to continue the installation.

Accessing Your Module

Conclusion

Commercial Lighting and Electric will use OpenERP’s CRM, project management and accounting modules to help streamline and improve the profitability of its business.

They chose OpenERP CRM over other competitive products like SugarCRM and Salesforce because it is flexible and can easily be adapted to their needs, but also because it is tied in with their project management and accounting modules requiring either less data entry, or less customization which would be required to integrate accounting with Sugar CRM and or Salesforce.

Being integrated with the project management allows the project managers to see any details, documents, e-mails or other information necessary to better manage their projects.  Project management is a very important part of Commercial Lighting and Electrics business.  Because the work flow can be managed and modified inside of OpenERP, Commercial Lighting and Electric will be able to implement their project management process how it best works for them.

Using general and analytical accounts, Commercial Lighting and Electric should be able to manage the cost’s associated with each job more effectively knowing if each job was profitable and making sure it is completed on time.  Migrating from Quickbooks to Openerp will give them advantages of having a completely integrated platform running their business rather than having accounting on the side as an additional thing that needs done.

It is expected that the OpenERP implementation will be completed over three months period of time.

Here I am going to guide you how to install OpenERP running as a service. The recent releases of debian based distros has

OpenERP as deb package so one can easily install it with a synaptic package management system, but instead here I am going to show you how to install an OpenERP server and web client from source and then run it as a service.

You need administrative (sudo) privilages on the server.

Login to the server as an administrative user (sudo).  We first need to install a PostgreSQL server if it is not already installed.

$ sudo apt-get install postgresql

$ sudo su – postgres

$ createuser --createdb --username postgres --no-createrole --pwprompt openerp

Enter password for new role:

Enter it again:

Shall the new role be a superuser? (y/n) n

$ exit

$ psql -U openerp -W

$ psql: FATAL:  Ident authentication failed for user "openerp"

$ sudo vi /etc/postgresql/8.4/main/pg_hba.conf

then it should be as following

# Database administrative login by UNIX sockets

local   all         postgres                          ident

# TYPE  DATABASE    USER        CIDR-ADDRESS          METHOD

# “local” is for Unix domain socket connections only

local   all         all                               md5

# IPv4 local connections:

host    all         all         127.0.0.1/32          md5

# IPv6 local connections:

host    all         all         ::1/128               md5

# IPv6 local connections:

host    all         all         ::1/128               md5

Now download OpenERP server and web client to a convenient location. I downloaded them to the OpenERP directory created in my home directory.

$ mkdir ~/openerp

$ cd ~/openerp

$ wget  http://www.openerp.com/download/stable/source/openerp-server-5.0.14.tar.gz

$ wget http://www.openerp.com/download/stable/source/openerp-web-5.0.14.tar.gz

$ tar zxvf  openerp-server-5.0.14.tar.gz

$ tar zxvf openerp-web-5.0.14.tar.gz

Installing OpenERP-server

$ cd ~/openerp/openerp-server-5.0.14

$ sudo python setup.py install

Now you can run the server in console by executing the command.

$ openerp-server --db_user=openerp --db_password=<password>

Installing openerp-web

$ sudo apt-get install  python-psycopg2 python-reportlab python-egenix-mxdatetime python-tz python-pychart python-pydot python-lxml python-vobject python-profiler

$sudo apt-get install python-dev build-essential

$sudo apt-get install python-setuptools

$ cd ~/openerp/openerp-web-5.0.14/lib

$ ./populate.sh

$ cd ..

$ openerp-web

You should be getting the following output.

Running openerp-web as a service

$ sudo cp /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/openerp_web-5.0.6-py2.6.egg/scripts/openerp-web /etc/init.d/

$sudo cp /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/openerp_web-5.0.6-py2.6.egg/config/openerp-web.cfg /etc/

$sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/openerp-web

$ useradd openerp

$ sudo vim /etc/init.d/openerp-web

Next edit /etc/openerp-web.cfg and specify the log files.

$ sudo gedit /etc/openerp-web.cfg

$ sudo mkdir /var/log/openerp-web/

$ sudo chown openerp /var/log/openerp-web/

$ sudo update-rc.d openerp-web defaults

$ sudo /etc/init.d/openerp-web start

Running openerp-server as a service

$ sudo vim /etc/init.d/openerp-server

$ sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/openerp-server

$ sudo update-rc.d openerp-server defaults

$ sudo vim /etc/openerp-server.conf

$ sudo touch /var/log/openerp-server.log

$ sudo chown openerp /var/log/openerp-server.log

$ sudo /etc/init.d/openerp-server start

OpenERP Project Management module provides great set of features in managing daily tasks within the organization.

By default, the Task Detail page does not display the person who created the task. As the task assigner, it is really important to identify the person who has created/assigned a particular task.

With the OpenERP’s rich support/flexibility in customizations, this can be resolved in no time.

In the database, the OpenERP task table (project_task) already contains a field to store the ID of the person who created particular record. We can use this field in implementing our requirement.

Table : project_task
Column : create_uid

We start customization from the model, then move on to the view.

Modifying Model

• Find out the model related to Project-Task. As it is used as a default OpenERP installation on Ubuntu, path used here appears like this.

/usr/lib/openerp-server/addons/project/project.py

Note that whatever the way you installed OpenERP server, all the modules go in side the ‘addons’ directory in your installation directory.

• Locate the class definition for Task.

i.e. class task(osv.osv):

• Append a new column definition to the columns declaration in task class as follows.  (i.e. _columns)

‘create_uid’: fields.many2one(‘res.users’, ‘Created By’),

Save the file.

• It might be necessary to reload/restart OpenERP server to apply the change made.

Now changing Model is done and we can continue to View part.

Modifying View

• Login to the system through Web-Client as the administrator.

• There are alternatives, but one path followed is given below.

Project Mangement (from main menu)   >>   Tasks   >>   All Tasks

• On the “All Tasks” page, you’d be able to locate a small button/link named [CUSTOMIZE] at the left-bottom corner of the page (just below the “import | export” links). Click on it, small menu will appear.

• Select “Manage View”.

• Select the view name “project.task.form” from the pop-up window then click Edit.

• To add the new field below the progress bar in task description page, click on the (+) sign in front of progress-bar XML element.

(i.e. <field name=”progress”>). Small pop-up window will appear.

• Select Node type “Field”, then “create_uid” in next drop down, then select “Update” link.

• On the Properties window that appears next, custom field properties accordingly. Also, selecting the correct group will be necessary.

That’s all. Click on a task and move to Task Detail view. Newly added field should appear there (anyway it should be read-only property).

Conclusion

What is explained above is a simple illustration of OpenERP’s flexibility in customization. Similarly it is possible to introduce new fields to the system according to the organizational needs. In this case specifically for the Project Management Module.

iBCScorp is making and publishing video’s via YouTube and ibcscorp.com. The videos are to not only to help the employees of iBCScorp better learn how to use the magnificent tool of Open ERP, but also allow anyone else to get an idea of how OpenERP software could be useful in their business.

Other training videos are being created and will soon be published on YouTube and iBCScorp.com. If you have any questions about Open ERP or all of the advantages it can provide for any business, please contact iBCScorp.

To view the YouTube video about timesheet click here.

The video covers all of the details anyone needs to know in order to use timesheet’s in Open ERP. A few of the details that are covered in the video are as follows:

• How to create a new timesheet in Open ERP
• How to clock in and out with in the timesheet
• How to complete a task
• How to import tasks into the timesheet

Please use the video as a training and share it with anyone that is wondering about timesheet’s in OpenERP or about OpenERP in general.

iBCScorp.com seeks OpenERP developers for its United States or Sri Lankan offices.

The OpenERP developer would support OpenERP implementation teams, help with OpenERP integration projects, contribute to the open source code base, and otherwise support OpenERP related projects.

Required Experience for an OpenERP Developer

• excellent communication skills
• 3 or more years of development experience in any language
• 1 or more years of Python experience
• at least 2 years of Linux experience

The ideal developers should have solid coding experience in Python.

Any experience in Open ERP with experience administrating and integrating the Open ERP to web applications and a demonstrative understanding of the underlying technologies is a plus.
Skills required:

• 2+ years programming experience
• 1+ years Python programming experience.
• OpenERP Implementation experience a plus

Note: Applicants who can join quickly would get priority.