Dev - New (Free) OFBiz Framework Introduction Videos, Documents

[David E. Jones]

I've been talking about doing this for a long time now, and finally decided to get going on it. So, I spent the weekend putting these together...

The intent of these training materials are to give technical and semi-technical (ie have made or customized Access or FoxPro type applications) people an introduction to the OFBiz Framework. These are based on the Example component and the intent is to provide an overview of the framework tools and see them in different contexts. These videos actually review the tools 3 times at different detail levels and perspectives to give a complete overview and hopefully facilitate good understanding of the tools and recommended patterns for using them.

It also has a video about doing some simple changes to the artifacts to show off some of the nice features of OFBiz and how quickly these sorts of things can be done.

These are not an attempt to cover every detail, just a high level overview plus a lot of background information to understand the concepts and goals behind the tools. Even at that the total length of these is almost 2 hours...

I am making these available for free to help adoption of OFBiz for those who aren't quite sure about all these funny tools we are using. I am planning a more complete series of videos that will be sold like the current training videos, but produced in this way with screen recordings and voice over.

The next thing I would like to see done with this is to create a document with the same structure and information as these videos. These took about 10 hours to prepare, record (with multiple takes, etc), and edit. I'm guessing it will take even longer to write a document based on them with screen shots and such. So, if anyone is interested in helping with this, it would be _great_. The effort could start with a simple transcription of these recordings, and then clean up the text, do screen shots, organize it into printable pages, etc.

There are links to these now on the ofbiz.org Home page and the Docs & Books page. Here is a link to the summary page as well:

http://www.ofbiz.org/VideosFrameworkIntro.html

NOTE: I request that all OFBiz committers and contributors take a bit of time to review these. They represent the "best practices" patterns for using the framework and my hope for future progress in the project is to more consistently follow these patterns.

Have fun everyone...

-David


 
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[davidnwelton]

> NOTE: I request that all OFBiz committers and contributors take a bit of time to review these. They represent the "best practices" patterns for using the framework and my hope for future progress in the project is to more consistently follow these patterns.

I think the first one could use a bit more 'flash and dazzle' if it's
to be used as a marketing tool.

*) Pictures of contributors.

*) Pictures of sites driven by OFBiz, or even things associated with
them.  Maybe some pictures from the conference showing happy,
satisfied OFBiz users.

*) Take advantage of the fact that it's a video, give people stuff to
see.  This goes for some of the other ones I had a look at too.
Focusing on the same screen for a long time is ok when it's highly
technical, but even there, showing something else, like how it relates
to a web page that a user sees might keep things a bit more 'lively'.

--
David N. Welton
 - http://www.dedasys.com/davidw/

Linux, Open Source Consulting
 - http://www.dedasys.com/
 
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[davidnwelton]

Another thought - start from a business' point of view and cover the
things a business needs from OFBiz:

*) OFBiz keeps track of the products you buy and sell...

*) ... the people and organizations who you buy and sell it from...

*) ... the shipments and orders involving people and products...

*) It does it by maintaining a complete, flexible and extensible data
model as well as the code to run business processes, and so on and so
forth...

*) Why OFBiz is different from your PHP storefront
application/SAP/whatever other competitors are deemed worthy of
mention.

Just dumping out a few ideas....
--
David N. Welton
 - http://www.dedasys.com/davidw/

Linux, Open Source Consulting
 - http://www.dedasys.com/
 
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[BJ Freeman]

A couple i use are
saving keystrokes and the errors of repetitive entry.
View this as an employee that never takes vacations or gets sick (well
almost never).
:)

David Welton sent the following on 5/23/2006 3:11 AM:

> Another thought - start from a business' point of view and cover the
> things a business needs from OFBiz:
>
> *) OFBiz keeps track of the products you buy and sell...
>
> *) ... the people and organizations who you buy and sell it from...
>
> *) ... the shipments and orders involving people and products...
>
> *) It does it by maintaining a complete, flexible and extensible data
> model as well as the code to run business processes, and so on and so
> forth...
>
> *) Why OFBiz is different from your PHP storefront
> application/SAP/whatever other competitors are deemed worthy of
> mention.
>
> Just dumping out a few ideas....

 
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[David E. Jones]

David,

I appreciate your feedback. I may have been a little optimistic about the marketing role of these videos... they are really intended to communicate and teach about the principles of the framework and to show it in action, and is definitely intended for a technical or semi-technical audience that wants to get an introduction to the OFBiz Framework.

It would be _really_ great to get some better marketing collateral on the ofbiz.org site, even going to the extent of reorganizing the site with a simple landing page that has basic information. The current home page is more information rich and developer/user oriented, and we could use some pages that are more oriented to those who are evaluating it and making a decision, especially for business level people that would not go into the technical details. And I agree that for them the framework introduction is really not appropriate, or in other words it wouldn't be too helpful for them: it doesn't have the information they are looking for, and has a lot of information they aren't really interested in.

Anyway, if someone with marketing experience and resources could help out with this, that would be great! I'm not quite so good at communication that is highly aesthetic with fairly low information density...

-David J.



David Welton wrote:

> Another thought - start from a business' point of view and cover the
> things a business needs from OFBiz:
>
> *) OFBiz keeps track of the products you buy and sell...
>
> *) ... the people and organizations who you buy and sell it from...
>
> *) ... the shipments and orders involving people and products...
>
> *) It does it by maintaining a complete, flexible and extensible data
> model as well as the code to run business processes, and so on and so
> forth...
>
> *) Why OFBiz is different from your PHP storefront
> application/SAP/whatever other competitors are deemed worthy of
> mention.
>
> Just dumping out a few ideas....

 
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[Hans Bakker]

Hi David,

I looked at all the video's and i think this is an exellent technical
introduction to the framework. In august I will go to Holland and will sure
use this to promote the system to other software companies there.
Another point though, I had to startup a windows PC to look....it would be
nice to have a version which runs on Linux.....

excellent job!

--
Regards,
Hans Bakker
ANT Websystems Co.,Ltd (http://www.antwebsystems.com)

If you want to verify that this message really originates from
from the above person, download the public key from:
http://www.antwebsystems.com/hbakkerAntwebsystems.asc

On Tuesday 23 May 2006 05:06, David E. Jones wrote:

> I've been talking about doing this for a long time now, and finally decided
> to get going on it. So, I spent the weekend putting these together...
>
> The intent of these training materials are to give technical and
> semi-technical (ie have made or customized Access or FoxPro type
> applications) people an introduction to the OFBiz Framework. These are
> based on the Example component and the intent is to provide an overview of
> the framework tools and see them in different contexts. These videos
> actually review the tools 3 times at different detail levels and
> perspectives to give a complete overview and hopefully facilitate good
> understanding of the tools and recommended patterns for using them.
>
> It also has a video about doing some simple changes to the artifacts to
> show off some of the nice features of OFBiz and how quickly these sorts of
> things can be done.
>
> These are not an attempt to cover every detail, just a high level overview
> plus a lot of background information to understand the concepts and goals
> behind the tools. Even at that the total length of these is almost 2
> hours...
>
> I am making these available for free to help adoption of OFBiz for those
> who aren't quite sure about all these funny tools we are using. I am
> planning a more complete series of videos that will be sold like the
> current training videos, but produced in this way with screen recordings
> and voice over.
>
> The next thing I would like to see done with this is to create a document
> with the same structure and information as these videos. These took about
> 10 hours to prepare, record (with multiple takes, etc), and edit. I'm
> guessing it will take even longer to write a document based on them with
> screen shots and such. So, if anyone is interested in helping with this, it
> would be _great_. The effort could start with a simple transcription of
> these recordings, and then clean up the text, do screen shots, organize it
> into printable pages, etc.
>
> There are links to these now on the ofbiz.org Home page and the Docs &
> Books page. Here is a link to the summary page as well:
>
> http://www.ofbiz.org/VideosFrameworkIntro.html
>
> NOTE: I request that all OFBiz committers and contributors take a bit of
> time to review these. They represent the "best practices" patterns for
> using the framework and my hope for future progress in the project is to
> more consistently follow these patterns.
>
> Have fun everyone...
>
> -David
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Dev mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://lists.ofbiz.org/mailman/listinfo/dev

 
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[David E. Jones]

Does anyone know if mplayer has H264 support yet? Once they do we should be able to accommodate that just fine... We may be able to consider another compression standard to use, but they tend to be significantly larger. It is a good point though, so we may want to consider a more Linux friendly alternative in some way...

-David


Hans Bakker wrote:

> Hi David,
>
> I looked at all the video's and i think this is an exellent technical
> introduction to the framework. In august I will go to Holland and will sure
> use this to promote the system to other software companies there.
> Another point though, I had to startup a windows PC to look....it would be
> nice to have a version which runs on Linux.....
>
> excellent job!
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>  
> _______________________________________________
> Dev mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://lists.ofbiz.org/mailman/listinfo/dev

 
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[cjhowe]

The movies run on VideoLAN (confirmed on Ubuntu) and MEncoder (according to wikipedia)

David E Jones <[hidden email]> wrote:

Does anyone know if mplayer has H264 support yet? Once they do we should be able to accommodate that just fine... We may be able to consider another compression standard to use, but they tend to be significantly larger. It is a good point though, so we may want to consider a more Linux friendly alternative in some way...

-David


Hans Bakker wrote:

> Hi David,
>
> I looked at all the video's and i think this is an exellent technical
> introduction to the framework. In august I will go to Holland and will sure
> use this to promote the system to other software companies there.
> Another point though, I had to startup a windows PC to look....it would be
> nice to have a version which runs on Linux.....
>
> excellent job!
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Dev mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://lists.ofbiz.org/mailman/listinfo/dev

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[Andrew Sykes]

David,

I have the same problem as Hans.

What about the compression used on the conference videos? That works
fine.
--
Kind Regards
Andrew Sykes <[hidden email]>
Sykes Development Ltd
http://www.sykesdevelopment.com

 
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[Christian Geisert]

Chris Howe schrieb:
> The movies run on VideoLAN (confirmed on Ubuntu) and MEncoder (according to wikipedia)

It works for me with vlc and mplayer (but only after a update to version
1.0-pre7cvs20060430) under debian sid.

Christian
 
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[David E. Jones]

Did you try VideoLAN as was suggested yesterday?

-David


Andrew Sykes wrote:
> David,
>
> I have the same problem as Hans.
>
> What about the compression used on the conference videos? That works
> fine.
 
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[David E. Jones]

Just reread the second part... This is pretty much the same compression as is used on the conference videos on the ofbiz.org site, unless you are referring to the older conference videos that were available on DVDs which were MPEG4 encoded. All videos that can be downloaded from ofbiz.org right now used H264 for the video and AAC for the audio...

-David


Andrew Sykes wrote:
> David,
>
> I have the same problem as Hans.
>
> What about the compression used on the conference videos? That works
> fine.
 
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[Ashish Vijaywargiya-2]

David,
I looked at those videos.
Really they were awesome.
The Artifact Reference Diagram that you included in your videos was excellent.
David you really tried your best in this videos.
It would be helpful for me and my colegues to.

Thanks for such a nice peace of work.

Thanks & Regards
Ashish Vijaywargiya

[David E. Jones]

Ashish,

That's great, I'm glad they were helpful.

I hope to produce a more extensive advanced series to replace the current Undersun training recording videos.

-David


Ashish Vijaywargiya wrote:

> David,
> I looked at those videos.
> Really they were awesome.
> The Artifact Reference Diagram that you included in your videos was
> excellent.
> David you really tried your best in this videos.
> It would be helpful for me and my colegues to.
>
> Thanks for such a nice peace of work.
>
> Thanks & Regards
> Ashish Vijaywargiya
> --
> View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Dev+-+New+%28Free%29+OFBiz+Framework+Introduction+Videos%2C+Documents-t1665592.html#a4608715
> Sent from the OFBiz - Dev forum at Nabble.com.
>
>  
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> Dev mailing list
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[rizki.wicaksono]

Hi David,

Thank you very much for your works, those videos is very helpful to
me. I wonder what tools did you use to make those great video
documentation ? Is there any free/opensource alternatives of the tools
? hopefully soon I can make documentation like those available in my
language.

Thanks
- Rizki Wicaksono -



On 5/30/06, David E. Jones <[hidden email]> wrote:

>
> Ashish,
>
> That's great, I'm glad they were helpful.
>
> I hope to produce a more extensive advanced series to replace the current
> Undersun training recording videos.
>
> -David
>
>
> Ashish Vijaywargiya wrote:
> > David,
> > I looked at those videos.
> > Really they were awesome.
> > The Artifact Reference Diagram that you included in your videos was
> > excellent.
> > David you really tried your best in this videos.
> > It would be helpful for me and my colegues to.
> >
> > Thanks for such a nice peace of work.
> >
> > Thanks & Regards
> > Ashish Vijaywargiya
> > --
> > View this message in context:
> http://www.nabble.com/Dev+-+New+%28Free%29+OFBiz+Framework+Introduction+Videos%2C+Documents-t1665592.html#a4608715
> > Sent from the OFBiz - Dev forum at Nabble.com.
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Dev mailing list
> > [hidden email]
> > http://lists.ofbiz.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
>
> _______________________________________________
> Dev mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://lists.ofbiz.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
>

--
- rizki wicaksono -
 
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[David E. Jones]

I just used a screen recorder program for the Mac called "Snapz Pro X", and then re-encoded the files using Quicktime into the H264 video standard to get them to be a little smaller. The screen recorder program supports simultaneous recording with a microphone on the system, so I just use the same headset that I use for voice recognition and Skype calls and such to record the audio as I go. Any free tools that do the same thing? Not the I'm aware, but there certainly may be...

-David


Rizki Wicaksono wrote:

> Hi David,
>
> Thank you very much for your works, those videos is very helpful to
> me. I wonder what tools did you use to make those great video
> documentation ? Is there any free/opensource alternatives of the tools
> ? hopefully soon I can make documentation like those available in my
> language.
>
> Thanks
> - Rizki Wicaksono -
>
>
>
> On 5/30/06, David E. Jones <[hidden email]> wrote:
>> Ashish,
>>
>> That's great, I'm glad they were helpful.
>>
>> I hope to produce a more extensive advanced series to replace the current
>> Undersun training recording videos.
>>
>> -David
>>
>>
>> Ashish Vijaywargiya wrote:
>>> David,
>>> I looked at those videos.
>>> Really they were awesome.
>>> The Artifact Reference Diagram that you included in your videos was
>>> excellent.
>>> David you really tried your best in this videos.
>>> It would be helpful for me and my colegues to.
>>>
>>> Thanks for such a nice peace of work.
>>>
>>> Thanks & Regards
>>> Ashish Vijaywargiya
>>> --
>>> View this message in context:
>> http://www.nabble.com/Dev+-+New+%28Free%29+OFBiz+Framework+Introduction+Videos%2C+Documents-t1665592.html#a4608715
>>> Sent from the OFBiz - Dev forum at Nabble.com.
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Dev mailing list
>>> [hidden email]
>>> http://lists.ofbiz.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
>> _______________________________________________
>> Dev mailing list
>> [hidden email]
>> http://lists.ofbiz.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
>>
>
>

 
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