ApacheCon EU 2014

Despite the success of Android and the rise of Tizen and Firefox OS, there seems to be no good open productivity tool on mobiles, inexplicable, given the interest and given the enormous population about to start using mobiles daily, as their default computing device.

But first: Mobiles are not desktops. To exploit the plusses offered we must abandon legacies, such as huge library dependencies, GUI toolkits designed in the 90s, and application architectures whose main effect now is to slow things down and make the mobile user think she is using a bad laptop, at best.

Mobile’s strengths start with the obvious: its mobile. But it also offers a simpler, more direct experience. For the developer at Apache, a mobile productivity tool, such as we have designed with UX Write, can leverage the code and open standards that annul vendor lock-in and obsolescence, while still providing acce

Every year companies spend large amounts of money looking for and evaluating an ERP to install for their business.

The Apache Open For Business (OFBiz) codebase may be robust and the data model impeccable but it is the Business End Users and not necessarily the Technical teams that choose what will be implemented.

OFBiz is a free open source ERP which is good value budget-wise – so when the end users come looking – what do they see? Is it what they want or expect?

In this presentation Sharan Foga will take a look at OFBiz through the eyes of the business end users and discuss the key things they see as most important when evaluating an ERP.

Apache OFBiz is an integrated suite of business applications for Small and Medium Enterprises, enabling uses in domains like CRM, Supply Chain Management, Manufacturing Management, Inventory and Warehouse Management, Project Management and Accounting. As such Apache OFBiz can be deployed in companies active in any area of the manufacturing sector, e.g. assembly, mining, food & beverages,.

Pierre will present a case study of the implementation of Apache OFBiz in a small European brewery and will highlight the challenges, opportunities and business aspects.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) excels at many things - fostering strong open source communities, creating excellent software, providing infrastructure to do the work, and providing a framework to verify the software before it's released.

But many projects want more from a foundation. In particular, they want to ensure that the world knows about the good work that they're doing, and the contributors want a foundation to provide resources to help take on tasks that developers typically do not enjoy or do well.

In this talk, Brockmeier will make the case for marketing FOSS projects in general, and specifically why Apache needs to evolve to help not only create software for the public good, but promote its projects as well.

At the Denver ApacheCon last April, I presented on the evolution of OpenOffice, and the need for a good quality, compatible solution for mobile devices.

Participants suggested establishing a project in Apache Labs to address this problem. It would depart from existing architectures but could reuse some elements from OpenOffice where appropriate. It would be lightweight, portable, and independent of legacy code.

A good starting point would be UX Write, developed by Peter Kelly. It only runs on iOS at present, but most of the code is cross-platform, and could be made to work on Android and other systems. Peter and I have discussed the idea of open-sourcing parts of the app under the Apache 2.0 license. The app uses HTML natively, and WebKit for displaying documents on-screen, and supports import/export of .docx, export of LaTeX, and could be further extended to support ODF.