ERP5 and Collaborative Portal Server teams announced at the Libre Software Meeting (LSM) international conference on Open Source / Free Software that they would join forces to provide the world first global Information System exclusively based on Open Source / Free Software. Collaborative Portal Server (CPS) is a content management and collaborative work system published under GPL license with more than 100 production instances implemented in large governmental organisations and very large industrial organisations. ERP5 is the first Entreprise Resource Planning system published under GPL license with successful implementation in European industry. The Alliance of ERP5 and CPS will provide corporations with seamless integration of collaborative and quantitative information systems based on the Zope Open Source / Free Application Server.

ERP5 allows to track quantitative information and implement management workflows. ERP5 features covers trading, invoicing, accounting, manufacturing, supply chain, stock, customer relation and product design.

CPS allows a group of users to share documents in multiple versions, implement administrative and publication workflows and create a single point of access to corporate information and services.

Expected outcome of the ERP5/CPS Alliance will allow to share basic technology building blocks: this includes common user authentication, distributed data synchronisation, uniform internationalisation and other innovative technologies. It will also provide a common access to ERP workflow tasks from CPS portal page and CPS administrative and publication tasks from ERP5.

Stéfane Fermigier, CEO of Nuxeo SARL, the company leading the CPS project, says "We are very proud to team up with the ERP5 crew. ERP5 provides a very fine and innovative solution which we intend to use internally for our day to day business needs. Integration with CPS will be eased by the fact both ERP5 and CPS are based on the Zope application server, the CMF content management framework and the DCWorkflow workflow engine."

Jean-Paul Smets, CEO of Nexedi SARL, leader of the ERP5 project adds "CPS provides world class document management with an excellent versioning engine. Its collaborative tools are well suited to the current evolution of the industry toward ODM and vertical disintegration. Nexedi will use CPS internally and offer it to its customers as a complement to ERP5 systems. "

Thierry Brettnacher, COO of Coramy, a leading European apparel manufacturer with production sites on 2 continents welcomes this move: "We have been using ERP5 at Coramy for 6 months with a database of more than 80,000 records and 800,000 lines. ERP5 is mainly used to share manufacturing and source chain supply information on all our sites. Because its use became ubiquitous, our users have been asking for a similar system to manage all corporate documents. CPS will be a perfect complement to ERP5 to fill this need."

About Nexedi

Nexedi is a consulting and development services company helping small and medium organisations to choose open source / free software and fulfill their IT application needs. Nexedi is the founder of the ERP5 project, a Free / Open Source ERP software based on innovative technologies (www.erp5.org). Nexedi is the global coordinator of the OpenBrick embedded platform (www.openbrick.org). Nexedi customers include apparel industry, telecommunication industry and consumer electronics.