iDempiere Demo – How to Learn Open Source ERP for Free

Hi Everyone,

The purpose of this post is to help make ERP accessible to more people. By following the instructions in this document, you should be able to learn iDempiere, open source ERP, in Amazon’s AWS hosting environment for free. By using the free tutorials on this site with your freely hosted iDempiere, you are armed with the best environment to determine if open source ERP is right for your organization.

Step #1
Create your free account with AWS. Click The ‘Get Started for Free‘ button on this page.
If you are new to AWS, you are eligible for their Free Usage Tier. This tier can be used to freely run your ERP in the cloud. With AWS, you can: learn and test your open source ERP and gain hands-on experience with iDempiere. You can even launch multiple environments in the cloud for playing with different iDempiere features. As your project and your company grows, AWS grows with you. AWS provides people like me, your average IT person, with an almost unlimited set of tools to configure, audit and support ERP.

Step #2
Launch an EC2 Server Instance. Search EC2 Getting Started for more detail
Choose the Ubuntu LTS 12.04 micro instance (free tier) when you have a small team performing light testing. If your team or your activity grows, move to the medium instance (not free). AWS scales ERP from one person to hundreds of people, and costs grow linearly as you grow.

Once you are at a command prompt for your new Linux server, proceed to the next step. If you need help launching or connecting to your new EC2 server, Google “EC2 Getting Started”. If you are using Windows, try searching on “using putty to connect to ec2”. Here is a tutorial for connecting via a Mac. There are many videos and written tutorials to help you get to your command prompt. If you find one that you like, add it to the below comments section.

Step #3
Copy and paste this command. Here is more detail
Execute the below command in your new EC2 machine. Wait 8 minutes, and iDempiere will magically appear on port 8080 of your new server. (http://YourServerURL.com:8080/webui).

sudo apt-get -y install mercurial; hg clone https://bitbucket.org/cboecking/idempiere-installation-script; chmod 766 idempiere-installation-script/*.sh; ./idempiere-installation-script/idempiere_install_script_master_linux.sh -P silly -l &>output.txt

Step #4
Learn and replicate this tutorial. Here is the tutorial
This iDempiere demo walks you through the basics of wholesale distribution. It teaches you how to:

• Navigate
• Create a new product
• Buy products
• Store products
• Ship products

You should try to replicate this tutorial in your iDempiere instance. My recommendation is to perform all your work in the GardenWorld demo client. Do not bother with trying to create your own client yet. Doing so will make it harder to learn the iDempiere basics. There is also a good chance that you will contaminate your first environment so badly that you need to hit the ‘reinstall button’.

I hope this helps!!

Why consider Open Source ERP

Open source ERP gives you every opportunity to prove or disprove its ability to support your company’s ERP needs on a timeline that satisfies your organizational needs. With open source ERP, you do not face the same financial constraints nor do you face the same conflicts of interest as with commercial ERP. Instead, you invest in the appropriate skills and knowledge for your people and processes. Best of all – if open source ERP cannot solve your company’s needs, you can safely justify spending the additional $2K to $5K per person per year for life of your commercial ERP to help drive your organization’s success.

ADempiere vs iDempiere vs Openbravo vs Compiere

The four environments are amazingly similar. iDempiere came from ADempiere. ADempiere came from Compiere. Compiere came from Jorg Janke. Jorg came from Oracle. As a result, iDempiere and ADempiere have much in common with Oracle’s ERP in terms of the financial feature set. This is both good and bad. Good because iDempiere and ADempiere are quite capable to help a company grow beyond $500M USD. Bad because they tend to be more complex in that they account for multiple languages, accounting schemas, currencies, calendars, costing types, costing methods, etc…. If you are a growing organization, and you need a system that will grow with you, and you have the right internal talent/resources, iDempiere or ADempiere will be a big asset for you.

The biggest difference between these products is that ADempiere and iDempiere are pure open source. ADempiere and iDempiere make all feature available for free. Compiere and Openbravo hold back features behind a commercial or paid license.

iDempiere and ADempiere vs OpenERP:

iDempiere/ADempiere (iD/AD) and OpenERP approach ERP from two very different directions. OpenERP comes out of the box with very simple options. If you are coming from QuickBooks, and you need a simple ERP system help you manage your business, OpenERP will look and feel comfortable. If you need complexity from OpenERP, you will need to install and configure many modules to find the feature sets you are looking for.

iD/AD come out of the box with every feature installed and configured to run a $200M+ USD business. If your business is growing rapidly, and you are willing to invest the time to learn an enterprise accounting system, then iD/AD will give you much more confidence.

The best way I know to describe the difference between iDempiere/ADempiere and OpenERP is by analogy to PostgreSQL and MySQL database systems. PostgreSQL and iD/AD started life as an enterprise-rich product that sometimes lacked the speed and simplicity of their counterparts. OpenERP and MySQL started life as small lightweight applications that lacked many of the enterprise features of their counterparts. Over time iD/AD have become more sleek and OpenERP has added more modules.

Which one is best for you depends on your internal talent, growth and business complexity.