Here is the situation: I have a customer who wants POS, webshop (with ebay and amazon shop synchronisation), stock control, customer order control and purchase ordering. Some of these needs have been since the start and some have emerged and evolved over time
. ERP/CRM seems to be a good idea for a backend and Adempiere seemed to tick all the boxes for our needs. I initially tried to get Adempiere installed on my remote, dedicated server but I had all sorts of problems and gave up until I had more time.We started out with a webshop for them that worked quite well using Zencart (installed via parallels on my remote server), this fell into disuse, not because of business but because of personal issues they were having coupled with frustration due to a lot of duplicated effort in stock control using spreadsheets. I did suggest they use the webshop exclusively as their stock system and POS and we even looked at POS plugins but none were quite suitable and along with their personal issues the webshop has been put on hold completely.
Since this time I have been trying to plan a new system for them and I thought we were going to use another e-commerce system (Magento) with plugins to achieve the rest but some of what they have asked for is looking hard to achieve without a proper ERP system so I have come back around to Adempiere.
At present they are using a standard electronic till but they have seen openbravo POS in my shop (I have a small retail front to my service business) and they like it. Openbravo POS I am familiar with and I have set up a system ready for them to use.
For various reasons, both on my end and at theirs, the new system is now overdue for implementation and I want to give them something to get busy with so I can get on with the rest.
Here are the questions:
If my customer starts data entry with openbravoPOS can all the product data be exported easily to Adempiere? They want to avoid having to re-enter data or having to go back over the data to add images or other information. If I understand the synchronisation adaptation from red1 correctly, it sends a sales order for the items but I am not clear if it will allow a product to be added to the catalogue that way.
Which (A/i)dempiere is now the current stable one and can I install it remotely using a console only on my server. I have a parallels management system on there but I also have complete root access. The system on there is CentOS 5. I did install to a local server using the AVA to have a look at Adempiere and this is ok but obviously my remote server with proper hosting and high bandwidth, as well as multiple IP addresses so the SSL certificate for the webshop can be applied to their virtual host, is much more suitable.
I have no doubt that with the help of this forum I can eventually get (A/i)dempiere installed and set up but it would really give me some breathing space if I could give my customer something practical to get on with.
Thank you for reading and hopefully helping!
P.S. They have a retail business with several thousand catalogue items so getting the data entry right first time could be life or death for me!