Open Source ERP - Red1.org

Now a first of its kind Masters Programme in Asia e-University

Open Source ERP Using the Web to make free ERP software viable worldwide

REDHUAN D. OON Leader of The ADempiere ERP Community

(INSIDE COVERS) ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND THIS BOOK Born as Daniel Oon Poh Shin in Singapore in 1961, the author grew up in mostly urban Kuala Lumpur. Schooled in The Victoria Institution, he abruptly halted his high-school education in 1980 to embrace Islam, taking on the name Redhuan and studied at Institute Dakwah Perkim for a year. Soon after that he offered part time tutoring at Yayasan Anda Akademik on the English subject. At the same time he studied at Goonʼs Institute to obtain his first taste of business computing. He worked as a COBOL programmer in Dataprep in 1982 where he was awarded the Best Employee of the Department 1983. He then joined an end-user Sri Jaya ʻBusʻ company which was utterly boring. He then left to setup his own small business of teaching and trading in personal computing machines. It was quite lucrative but he yearned to rejoined the real world of hacking software codes. He half got that when he became Bank Bumiputra's Internet Consultant in 1996. He then became Siti Nurhaliza's webmaster in 2000 during the dotcom heyday. He became CTO of a few companies and his last job at that was migrating a B2B Oracle Exchange from Redwood Shores, USA to a Malaysian data-centre, of which upon his successful mission was abruptly fired, thanks to the sweeping dotcom bubble burst enveloping the world. He then moved with his family of an African born wife and 4 kids to a low lease 2-acre farm home obscured by a long village road and experimented with bean sprouts, angled beans and fishes which ended in unremarkable failure. Thanks to a thin copper phone line leading to his home with ADSL broadband facility, he then built an online presence through his website, www.red1.org. In 2003, with no real ERP, Financial or Java experience he got his real chance of tasting codes again when he came across the Compiere ERP project in SourceForge.net where all the sourcecodes are available. He became its most active community member contributing technical tutorials strongly mixed in humour where he lacks in technical speed due to having left the programming world far too long. In September 2006, when the community revolted against Compiere for selling off and becoming closed, the populist red1.org forum became the venue of a new project called

ADempiere, of which Red1 (as he is infamously known in cyberspace) was nominated its temporal leader till this day. Due to web-based Open Source, and within the comfort of his farm home, he managed to secure small projects from New York, Bonn, Medan and downtown KL to implement ERP and train users remotely. Many of them were new experiences for him and some of its remarkable failures helped him formulate his own set of theories as to what makes ERP work or otherwise. In October 2008, the Dean of ICT, Asia e-University (a project under the 31 nations Asia Cooperative Dialog) contacted him to introduce the first ever Masters in Open Source ERP. After completing the first workbook module, the dean, Dr Nurhizam Safie suggested that it be made into a book to better preach freedom to the masses. Both felt that to truly enjoy a leading edge technology, it is good to know some of its history and the leader's thinking behind it. This book tries to capture the important aspects and present the unpredictable path of what open source ERP can be and especially so that it is now the defacto most active project in Sourceforge.net. Presently Redhuan together with Dr. Nurhizam is on a private mission to lobby both public and private sectors around the world to transform their human economy equation for Small and Medium Enterprises and Industries with the now viable and freely available Open Source ERP by The ADempiere Project. If you are interested to collaborate on this you may contact Nurhizam Safie Bin Mohd Satar Dean, School of Information & Communication Technology Asia e University (AeU) No. 4, Jalan Sultan Sulaiman 50000 Kuala Lumpur MALAYSIA DL : +603-27850060 alt. e-mail : [email protected] URL : www.aeu.edu.my Redhuan D. Oon Honorary Advisor, ADempiere Deutschland e.V. Nahmitzer Damm 32 12277 Berlin Germany Phone: +49-30-69203854-0 Fax: +49-30-69203854-9 email: [email protected] URL: www.adempiere.org

(OUTSIDE BACK COVER) We live in an exciting world with exciting questions: 1. Have you ever wondered what is Open Source ERP and what it means to you and your country? 2. Do you know how a dropout Malaysian staying in a farm can become a world champion? 3. Are you curious and want to understand how others are making billions in the new economy? 4. Are you concerned and wish to avoid what many more are losing in billions? 5. Do you want to really take advantage of an open source software? 6. Do you like to introduce this subject to your organisation or institution for cutting edge education? 7. Do you want to become part of something big on the Web without really trying? This book is down to earth and yet gently introducing you to the elusive and technical world of Open Source with the right answers! Its written in conversational and systematic but intuitive form to quickly immerse the reader in the fast changing and emerging world of open source software and using the authorʼs own world reigning project in Business ERP as an apt example.