Announcement: planned open source billing system demonstration now available

Just wanted to drop you all a quick note that CogBilling, an online billing system which integrates with GnuCash, is now available for review at http://www.rsmba.biz/download. CogBilling is an online database driven billing system written entirely on open source products. In its present state it's intentionally void of heavy graphic images and "creature features" to maximize flexibility in developing future versions. CogBilling is intended to be useful for any professional services organization, but ultimately should function especially well in organizations that do software development, legal services and the like. Furthermore, CogBilling is intended to be integrated into large IT infrastructures such as those found in healthcare institutions, clinics and physician practices.

This application is the first public release of our planned open source applications. Once we can sustain continuous development of the application through the sale of services and website hosting we will release the whole thing under a traditional open source license (e.g. Gnu, BSD, etc . . .). At the present, we expect this to occur in the spring or summer of 2004.

For the more technically inclined, CogBilling was written in Embedded Perl (Embperl), and uses a PostgreSQL database as the backend. It is hosted on the latest version of the Apache web server.

This is the first beta release of the product, so the user interface promises to be a bit rough, and the online manual is not presently available. However, you will find that the system's basic functionality works.

Future directions we have planned with this product is deeper integration with GnuCash at the database level, integration with GnoTime, and integration with Issue Tracker.

You can e-mail me directly, but for the benefit of the Open Source community you should also post comments, criticisms or suggestions posted to this discussion list.

Thank you.

Richard Schilling