Open ERP

Our project development team lead, Rowel recently gave an internal presentation on the different iterations the ComUnion user interface went through before settling on the final design.

In terms of UI design, one of the major goals was to make the interface elements consistent across all components. A lot of the icons and widgets are actually shared across many of the modules so navigating from one component to another presents users with a consistent experience. We used the excellent Flexigrid Jquery plugin (the developer Paulo and maintainer Lovely, are actually a core contributors to ComUnion--thanks Paulo and Lovely!!!) for data presentation to the user.

Here for posterity, are the UI design iterations. Im posting it here so the community can give feedback:

A few weeks back I was invited to attend an executive briefing on open, collaborative, community-based innovation. The speaker was Michael Tiemann, Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat. He titled his talk "Exonovation," to avoid the connotation the word "innovation", he says, has with internal organizational efforts at innovation. In his talk-he showed how organizations today (including his own company) are able to leverage the innovation of others to create sustainable competitive advantage that benefits not only themselves, but their community and industry ecosystem as a whole as well.

For those reading this blog who are not fans of boxing, Filipino boxer (and what many say is the best pound-for-pound fighter in the ring today) Manny Pacquiao, beat American-Mexican Oscar, the "Golden Boy" dela Hoya last December 6 in Las Vegas Nevada (December 7 in Manila, Philippines).

What was widely considered a mismatch with a fight pitting the taller and naturally heavier American versus the smaller Filipino fighter proved true but not in the way many pundits expected. By the beginning of the ninth round of the fight, a badly beaten and tired dela Hoya surrendered to the smaller, faster and more accurate punching power of Pacquiao--ending what was largely a one-sided fight.

Now this fight has already been widely dissected and analyzed by experts and boxing fans for its place in history. I want to look at it from a different perspective by using what happened as an analogy to describe what I feel is happening in the enterprise software industry today.