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At SmartMode we believe in smart backups and that is by eliminating any chances of data loss and providing 100% redundancy in case of fire/flood/user error and any other act of God.

Obviously you can use the OpenERP auto_backup module for this, yet that relies on OpenERP server cron and having this run independently is a better choice.

Lets establish the backup policy first:

There are a lot of wiki's and blogs on how to install zarafa mailserver, yet when it comes to a simple A to Z guide on how to be up an running with all the trimmings, it is something of a shortage...

So, lets install a new OpenVZ VPS with:

 that is the question...

The conventional mentality of most organisations is not to adopt open source software as part of their IT infrastructure. Observing this at times is quite amusing as most of the arguments brought forward by IT managers against the open source are simple myths. Below are a few of them.
Myth 1 – open source is not supported and if something goes wrong you are on your own.

• This may have been the case sometime ago, yet it’s becoming history with most of the open source projects. At least on the ‘business applications’ level such as ERP, BI, CRM systems, all of them are backed up by their developers with various subscription options available to guarantee bug fixes and help.

Myth 2 – open source may come free, but in long run will be more expensive.We are yet to see that in real life; however from the hypothetical point of view the counter arguments are as follows.

• Cost of the software – obviously open source will be free and maybe some additional functionality will bear a small price.

As OpenERP6 is not long from being released, yet it brings so many useful features, we couldn’t wait for the official OpenERP 5 to OpenERP 6 migration script to be released and what a better way to do that than Pentaho Data Integration kit!

So first steps first – create the database via the OpenERP GTK. This installs the base module and populates some db tables with initial data.

Second step – install the needed modules, including any new ones chosen as well as the custom ones if any. In our specific scenario, we had a light custom module, old voucher_payment module and PowerEmail in addition to the other basic modules - accounting, HR, etc. Our custom module was compatible with the new OpenERP version, so no problems there. However we decided to make use of the new official accounting_voucher module instead of the old one as well as use the email_template instead of the PowerEmail. This would require some remapping and additional transformational steps, but nothing is impossible with Pentaho ETL. Once the above is done, time to make a backup of the new database as well as the old one.

OpenERP 6 (trunk) has been in development since sometime begining of this year and it starts to look good indeed.

Searching arround the web didnt bring any uptodate tutorials on OpenERP trunk v6 installation and personally having gone through a few issues with that, below is a quick roundup of steps that could be taken to get OpenERP v6 rc1 and OpenERP v6 rc1 web client running.