Open-source software developer xTuple has added drop-ship purchasing, time and expense management, and cloud computing to the latest release of its enterprise resource planning software, xTuple ERP 3.5.

The company plans to provide the xTuple cloud service at no charge during the month of April. It hopes to encourage feedback from users to help define what will eventually be a commercial service. xTuple will later bill for the software on a monthly basis, possibly across all three editions of the software. The latest version of xTuple gives users of the company’s free PostBooks Edition the ability to run their database in the cloud via the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, also known as Amazon EC2.

PostBooks is regularly available for $350 per user per year.

The new release “gives distributors, manufacturers and service-oriented businesses improved visibility into company data, increased control over their operations and the ability to make informed business decisions,” said xTuple chief executive Ned Lilly. “The continuous involvement of our community of customers, partners, and open-source users is the key to the ongoing improvement of the product. It’s how we’re able to add more and more sophisticated enterprise functionality, while keeping the simplicity that SMBs require.”

Version 3.5 enhances the customer relationship management features in earlier versions of the software, allowing developers to build plug-in extension packages for xTuple ERP.

All three versions of xTuple, including PostBooks, Standard, and Manufacturing, run on Mac, Windows and Linux computers. They are all internationalized with multi-currency features, support for multiple tax structures, and multilingual translation packs maintained by the global xTuple open-source community.

For more information, visit www.xtuple.com.