Si Chen

Eric Qualman’s talk in Atlanta earlier this month got me thinking some more.  I started to play with words: “social media,” “social network,” “networking”…what did it all mean?  Interestingly enough, after a while the words themselves revealed a pattern.  Here are my notes on hotel stationery which I’d like to share with you. Let me show you with an all-too-LA example: In the age of television, media was how content was transmitted: cable, satellite content was the shows networks like ABC, NBC, HBO, and ESPN bundled the content and broadcast them over media to viewers, who used platforms to view the content.  The most common platform was the TV, and then later VHS (remember those?), DVD’s, TiVO, and now Hulu showed up. And networking was the act of gathering up conten... (more)

opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM Quarterly Update

Easier to Use and Better Looking We’ve introduced a new keyword search feature for opentaps, based on Hibernate search, Apache lucene, and Google Web Toolkit We’ve also enhanced searching for invoices, payments, accounting transactions, and orders with new fields you can search with We think the new look for opentaps applications is a lot better and hope you agree. For Java developers, we... (more)

Quick Comparison of eCommerce Platforms

eCommerce Journal on Ulitzer We’ve been working on an integration of the Magento e-commerce platform for opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM, and some of our long-time users have also talked about integrating opentaps with Spree. I took a quick look at both and make some notes about them. Since we’re not developers of or service providers for either one,  and we plan to support integration wit... (more)

Retail Industry and Open Source ERP

A group of graduate students from the Lancaster University in Lancaster, UK contacted me last year regarding a research project they were doing. They wanted to compare open source and commercial ERP systems for the retail industry and evaluated opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM, openbravo, and Microsoft Dynamics NAV (Navision). They were kind enough to share their results with us, and you ca... (more)

Comparing Magento vs Spree Open Source eCommerce Platforms

We’ve been working on an integration of the Magento e-commerce platform for opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM, and some of our long-time users have also talked about integrating opentaps with Spree. I took a quick look at both and make some notes about them. Since we’re not developers of or service providers for either one,  and we plan to support integration with both in opentaps, I hope y... (more)