Openbravo POS Review

Intro

Recently, I was able to observe the configuration of an Openbravo POS system. Although this is not intended to be a comprehensive review, perhaps a review of what I observed will help someone.

Setup

Openbravo POS was installed on a Windows Vista machine. MariaDB was the database used and java was required. This setup seemed fairly straightforward with mysql commands being performed via the command prompt. You'll need to remember to add the MariaDB bin folder to the environment variables. Also, remember when adding users and privileges to the MariaDB databases to issue the flush privileges command. The POS System was setup in restaurant mode in this case.

The Positives

Capabilities
One of the reasons why OpenBravo was chosen was to allow for installation on tablets that could then connect to a database on a central station. Apparently, not all open source POS systems were capable of being installed on tablets.

User Interface
OpenBravo POS had a pretty nice interface that could be accessed via a touchscreen. It allowed users to do standard things you'd expect with a POS: add products, take orders, check out guests, etc... All of this was done with fairly a pleasant look. There was also an image of the restaurant with tables that could be selected, and details added to those tables.

The Negatives

One thing that was lacking was time tracking that would allow employees to check in and out and then some way of reporting to payroll.

Conclusion

Other than the one negative, Openbravo POS seems to be a pretty nice solution for at least a restaurant's needs.