Evaluating ofbiz, users please give me your feedback

[pprice]

I am evaluating several technologies for a project I'm about to start on and ofbiz caught my eye. I am a little disappointed at how dated some of the documentation for the project is and some of the steps in the tutorial are incomplete or don't work. But I don't want to judge this book by it's cover, I'd like to ask people who are actually using it what they think and if they're happy with it. So, are you happy with ofbiz? Has it been easy to adapt to your business needs? What has been the biggest frustration/limitation you've faced with your ofbiz application?

Ofbiz seems like a great starting point for what I want to do, but there is one requirement I have that may eliminate ofbiz as an option. I need to be able to support multiple customers from a single instance of the application and some of their data needs to be sandboxed. I've looked at the multi-tenancy support of ofbiz but I do not want to manage the potentially hundreds of additional databases this approach would require. Essentially I want to associate core pieces of information (people, orders, etc) with a single client. In essence I want to add a clientID to each piece of data and filter such that a logged in user would only be able to interact with data for their clientID. Would this be an easy, moderately difficult, or impossible feature to implement in ofbiz?

I am also unfamiliar with what a production deployment of ofbiz might look like. I am most familiar with deploying applications to tomcat but it seems ofbiz has an embedded tomcat and must be invoked from the ofbiz.jar. I would appreciate hearing some examples of how deployments, upgrades, etc. are managed.

I am sure I will have more questions as (if) this conversation progresses and I look forward to learning from the group.

Thanks!
-Preston

There is plenty of up to date documentation available.
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBADMIN/OFBiz+Documentation+Index

It is being made better every day.
Also there are several good books detailing the use of OFBiz both from a developer and also accounting, eCommerce, and MRP.

I would check on google for commercial install instructions. I believe it is documented using tomcat external.

All I can tell you is it has been a great environment for our company to get what we needed. I am adding inventory to a point of sale package. I am about 4 months in and have most of the work complete. The fact that it comes with groovy and freemarker and a bunch of components is huge. I completely redid the inventory, requirements, and P.O. screens and streamlined the cycle so a restaurant owner can get inventory in pretty easy. I am going to add a few features (some may already be in there and I will check it out first). I need Cost of good sold and I know it has accounting, but since we are not actually using sales to remove inventory it is probably going to be something I come up with. I am also going to add storage and ordering to my inventory so a restaurant owner can order the products in say a bar or a freezer. The idea is they use a tablet instead of paper to take inventory. Use MRP to generate requirements based on min qty and create P.O. and receive. It is working well. I added a conversion so when stuff gets turned into a P.O. it converts to supplier UOM. when they recieve it goes back to stocking UOM. I modified the inventory adjustment to take quantities in both UOM and add together and calculate the adjustment.

[Ron Wheeler]

It sounds like you have forked the project and made some pretty
substantial changes to get to your version.
What version did you start with?

Have you applied any of your changes back to the Apache version?

How easy has it been to apply the new features and bug fixes from the
Apache project to your version of OfBiz?

Ron

On 16/10/2014 8:29 AM, [hidden email] wrote:

> There is plenty of up to date documentation available.
> https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBADMIN/OFBiz+Documentation+Index
>
> It is being made better every day.
> Also there are several good books detailing the use of OFBiz both from a
> developer and also accounting, eCommerce, and MRP.
>
> I would check on google for commercial install instructions. I believe it is
> documented using tomcat external.
>
> All I can tell you is it has been a great environment for our company to get
> what we needed. I am adding inventory to a point of sale package. I am about
> 4 months in and have most of the work complete. The fact that it comes with
> groovy and freemarker and a bunch of components is huge. I completely redid
> the inventory, requirements, and P.O. screens and streamlined the cycle so a
> restaurant owner can get inventory in pretty easy. I am going to add a few
> features (some may already be in there and I will check it out first). I
> need Cost of good sold and I know it has accounting, but since we are not
> actually using sales to remove inventory it is probably going to be
> something I come up with. I am also going to add storage and ordering to my
> inventory so a restaurant owner can order the products in say a bar or a
> freezer. The idea is they use a tablet instead of paper to take inventory.
> Use MRP to generate requirements based on min qty and create P.O. and
> receive. It is working well. I added a conversion so when stuff gets turned
> into a P.O. it converts to supplier UOM. when they recieve it goes back to
> stocking UOM. I modified the inventory adjustment to take quantities in both
> UOM and add together and calculate the adjustment.
>
>
>
> -----
> Joel Fradkin
> --
> View this message in context: http://ofbiz.135035.n4.nabble.com/Evaluating-ofbiz-users-please-give-me-your-feedback-tp4656777p4656825.html
> Sent from the OFBiz - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>

--
Ron Wheeler
President
Artifact Software Inc
email: [hidden email]
skype: ronaldmwheeler
phone: [phone], ext 102

Ron Wheeler wrote

It sounds like you have forked the project and made some pretty
substantial changes to get to your version.
What version did you start with?

I started with 12.04 I think.
I did switch to 13.07.

Ron Wheeler wrote

Have you applied any of your changes back to the Apache version?

I don't think any of what I did is applicable to put back. Its pretty specific to our needs (1 facility so removed facility drop down for example).
I asked my boss if I could some how get the EDI stuff I did back to the community, but he said no.
I doubt he would want me putting any of the other code back if it was applicable, but it is just not generic enough.
My point is that it is pretty easy to get a lot done and accomplish your goals using OFBiz as a base.

Ron Wheeler wrote

How easy has it been to apply the new features and bug fixes from the
Apache project to your version of OfBiz?

It was pretty easy to get the latest stuff. I did have some fun with syntax changes from one version to the other. But all my stuff is in a hot deploy folder. I have copied many java, groovy, ftl, and XML files over and modified them. So I had to make sure all the changes to any of those files were applied. I have been trying to only modify front ends and have done as little as possible to routines that say add suppliers etc.
I did my own add supplier page but used the party back end stuff to add the party and roles for example.

[Jacques Le Roux]

Le 16/10/2014 19:11, [hidden email] a écrit :
> My point is that it is pretty easy to get a lot done and accomplish your goals using OFBiz as a base

This is indeed a major objective of the OFBiz project!

Jacques

> . ----- Joel Fradkin -- View this message in context:
> http://ofbiz.135035.n4.nabble.com/Evaluating-ofbiz-users-please-give-me-your-feedback-tp4656777p4656839.html Sent from the OFBiz - User mailing list
> archive at Nabble.com.

[Ron Wheeler]

Thanks for the very detailed answer.
It helps understand how OfBiz is being used.

Ron

On 16/10/2014 1:11 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

> Ron Wheeler wrote
>> It sounds like you have forked the project and made some pretty
>> substantial changes to get to your version.
>> What version did you start with?
> I started with 12.04 I think.
> I did switch to 13.07.
>
>
> Ron Wheeler wrote
>> Have you applied any of your changes back to the Apache version?
> I don't think any of what I did is applicable to put back. Its pretty
> specific to our needs (1 facility so removed facility drop down for
> example).
> I asked my boss if I could some how get the EDI stuff I did back to the
> community, but he said no.
> I doubt he would want me putting any of the other code back if it was
> applicable, but it is just not generic enough.
> My point is that it is pretty easy to get a lot done and accomplish your
> goals using OFBiz as a base.
>
>
> Ron Wheeler wrote
>> How easy has it been to apply the new features and bug fixes from the
>> Apache project to your version of OfBiz?
> It was pretty easy to get the latest stuff. I did have some fun with syntax
> changes from one version to the other. But all my stuff is in a hot deploy
> folder. I have copied many java, groovy, ftl, and XML files over and
> modified them. So I had to make sure all the changes to any of those files
> were applied. I have been trying to only modify front ends and have done as
> little as possible to routines that say add suppliers etc.
> I did my own add supplier page but used the party back end stuff to add the
> party and roles for example.
>
>
>
> -----
> Joel Fradkin
> --
> View this message in context: http://ofbiz.135035.n4.nabble.com/Evaluating-ofbiz-users-please-give-me-your-feedback-tp4656777p4656839.html
> Sent from the OFBiz - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>

--
Ron Wheeler
President
Artifact Software Inc
email: [hidden email]
skype: ronaldmwheeler
phone: [phone], ext 102

[pprice]

I am a bit confused with the demo application. Looking in some of the content tables I see references to some content like articles, but I don't see where this content can be viewed. For example, articles are not visible anywhere from the ecommerce target (http://<servername>/ecommerce)

From what I can tell there are essentially 2 sites out of the box: the admin/webtools site, and the ecommerce site. Is there another?

Thanks