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Demystifying Enterprise Resource Planning softwares and explaining the concepts in plain English. No matter if you're an executive officer, IT consultant, software developer or a business manager, you've heard people talk about ERP in meetings and sessions.  And probably a half-dozen of ERP providers have already come knocking at your office door to present their products. No doubt that you have spent hours searching the Internet on what exactly is an ERP and how can it help an organisation.  But if you're still in doubt, this writing may help you.  I'll try to explain the golden characteristics of an ERP in a simple language; so please bear with me. The Definition ERP is an integrated, business process oriented and best practice based information system that helps managers better understand the situation of their organisations. So a software that is called an ERP is: Integrated Business process oriented Best practice based and its ultimate goal is to help ma...

The difference between "Comprehensive Software Design" and "General Software Design" and why Comprehensive is the only way. Let's assume a simple categorisation of business into trade and manufacturing. Most of the companies that are active in a category, arrange and manage their processes - despite different fields of business- inspired by a similar and close to optimal pattern.  For example all trade companies share the same processes and concepts such as sales region, sales commission, petty cash and etc.  The pattern is called best practice . Good Now, imagine that you have designed and implemented information software for 25 trade companies so far; naturally resulting in your extensive knowledge of trade firms' processes and requirements -put simply, best practice.  In other words, you do know what the customer wants and needs. What happens if you decide to design a comprehensive information system for trade firms? As you know their requirements...

Introducing a small software to analyse a mailbox. Recently Ed Daniel (a friend of mine) needed to produce a time analysis report out of his e-mails and asked if I can help him.  Well, obviously I said yes. I thought to myself, he needs charts and graphs and data querying from many aspects that I may not know.  So to me the best option is to load his e-mail important fields into an RDBMS (such as SQLite or PostgreSQL).  Later he can do whatever he wants with the data using reporting tools such as JasperReports and produce nice charts and graphs as he requires. That was the motivation to write Amailyser (github repo) . The language is Python 2.x; I could have done it in Perl but I'm learning Python and it seems like a wonderful practice to me. For DB interaction I used SQLAlchemy a nice ORM mapper for Python. To read the e-mail messages I used Python standard library mailbox. After downloading and extracting, you can run the Amailyzer (after you have modified con...

Summary of a meeting with people at foss.ir about ADempiere. Today I was at a meeting at foss.ir office. It was my first time and I was kind of surprised when I met the head, Mr. Ebadi; I was expecting a somehow old know-it-all guy but he was young. Later on I realised that it's an advantage that he's young: he's active! No offence to the older ones but it's just the norm, you know! Before starting the talk another member joined us: Mr. Maddahi; another young motivated person. It was almost a long meeting; we talked about 3 hours and the main topic was how to promote open source in Iran. They have alreay been active for about 4 years but mainly concentrating on the open source backbone software specially Linux. Promoting open source software requires both enough enthusiasts to work on open source projects and enough jobs for them to make their ends meet. So it's a two-way movement: grasping and motivating enthusiasts while convincing and motivating the entre...

In open source world, communicating with members or community (which is almost always carried out by using mailing lists or forums) is crucial to a successful usage or development. Though it requires following only a few simple tricks (etiquette), failing to do so almost invariably leads to hot insulting debates a.k.a flame wars. The most notable fact about internet communication is that it's usually offline. The key to have a successful offline communication is to avoid emotions; this is relatively easy to do, most of the times, following some simple classic rules. 1. Read Thoroughly If you're willing to add your idea to a discussion or comment on someone's post, you first have to understand them. So before even hitting the " reply " button, read the post completely and thoroughly. You will be surprised by the quality of your posts/comments afterwards! Thanks Michael Richter for brining this point up. 2. No CAPS! Avoid w...