Fw: OfBiz e-commerce customization

[Vadim Eisenberg]

Hi David,

Now I am suffering from encoding issues. Please note that the question
mark "?" in my previous message relates to the long dash "--". The fixed
message is forwarded.

Best Regards,
Vadim
-------------------------------
Vadim Eisenberg
IT for Healthcare & Life Sciences
IBM Research - Haifa
 
----- Forwarded by Vadim Eisenberg/Haifa/IBM on 04/09/2010 11:40 AM -----

From:
Vadim Eisenberg/Haifa/IBM@IBMIL
To:
[hidden email]
Date:
04/09/2010 11:02 AM
Subject:
Re: OfBiz e-commerce customization



Hi David,
 
Thank you for your answer and explanations. I failed with the formatting
for the second time, so I will try to write in plain text from now on.
 
You wrote: "when asking questions here please keep in mind that responses
you get are volunteer responses and the only qualification you can be sure

of for those responding
is that they are capable of subscribing to the mailing list. If many
people respond with something
consistent then it is a safer bet that you can rely on the information,
but usually not otherwise."
 
I guess this is how Open Source works :) - by volunteers contributing code

to the product and answering questions in the mailing lists. I still would

like to hear as much opinions as possible from the developers "in the
trenches", so anybody is welcome to provide them. I would like to thank BJ

again for providing his opinions.
 
Please note that the project I participate in, is a kind of Research and
Development project, sponsored by EU and implemented by a consortium of
academic and industrial partners. The project is planned for four years
(ending in January 2014). One of its goals is to create an open source
implementation of an e-commerce solution - uStore, suited for the field of

AAL - Ambient Assisted Living (that is a kind of "smart home" for senior
citizens). The main concept of uStore is similar to the concept of
AppStore of Apple - the AAL application developers would be able to upload

and sell their applications from the store. In addition to that, AAL
related devices and human services would be sold. An additional important
feature is to integrate "social commerce" - user reviews, blogs, forums
etc.
 
Please note that developing uStore is Research and Development and there
are not yet concrete AAL businesses that would immediately use it. The
goal is to provide some reference open source implementation in four
years. This implementation would be later supported and extended by an
open-source community according to the business needs of AAL businesses,
once some real AAL businesses would use it. One of the goals is to reuse
the existing open-source OOTB solutions in any field as much as possible
in order to save resources as much as possible.
 
As a result of the situation, the accent here is more on e-commerce
features of existing e-commerce solutions, especially related to the
e-commerce frontend, than on their ERP features. We would like to use the
simplest and the most straightforward standard business model (preferably
OOTB) for e-commerce and invest more resources into the frontend features.

By the frontend features I mean the website, its accessibility, including
presentation on smart phones, search, recommendations, user reviews, blogs

and forums etc. As I understand the strength of OfBiz is actually its rich

ERP data model, however here we probably do not need the advanced ERP
features of OfBiz.
 
I have read your HEMP Light document - it was interesting and provided
some insights for me. Currently we are in process of finalizing the use
cases/requirements of the uStore and evaluating existing e-commerce
solutions, with OfBiz being one of the main candidates.
 
Thanks & Regards,
Vadim

-------------------------------
Vadim Eisenberg
IT for Healthcare & Life Sciences
IBM Research - Haifa
 

David E Jones <[hidden email]> wrote on 03/09/2010 10:00:38 PM:

> From:
>
> David E Jones <[hidden email]>
>
> To:
>
> [hidden email]
>
> Date:
>
> 03/09/2010 10:01 PM
>
> Subject:
>
> Re: OfBiz e-commerce customization
>
>
> Vadim,
>
> About your formatting: this mailing list filters out all HTML
> because HTML email messages tend to be VERY large and the Apache
> Software Foundation in general has many thousands of messages going
> through mailing lists every day.
>
> Back to your original question: when asking questions here please
> keep in mind that responses you get are volunteer responses and the
> only qualification you can be sure of for those responding is that
> they are capable of subscribing to the mailing list. If many people
> respond with something consistent then it is a safer bet that you
> can rely on the information, but usually not otherwise. With a
> question as long and involved as yours chances are you'll only get a
> small number of responses, and chances are your experience will be
> VERY different from those few who do respond.
>
> OFBiz is a large project. A good developer can learn to work
> effectively with the framework with a couple of weeks of training
> and a couple of months of hands-on development. However, even a good
> developer will have a hard time picking up all of the data
> structures and business logic even after many months of study, and
> realistically since most people don't or can't do that, it usually
> takes years of work experience and even then they'll only have
> knowledge of the parts of the system that have had the opportunity
> to work with.
>
> Understanding the business side is much easier for someone who has a
> good business background, and by good business background I mean
> really good experience with how businesses actually operate and what
> sorts of information businesses actually keep track of when
> operating. Sometimes people coming out of university business
> programs will have this, but most of the time they do not. Most
> people with business degrees will have learned more about laws and
> how to manipulate people than about the myriad of complexities of
> managing a warehouse, handling purchasing, or tracking information
> about products to facility the many touch points with those products
> throughout the company, and making it easy for customers to find
> products they want, or how to figure out where customer interest
> intersects with stuff you want to move.
>
> So anyway, keep in mind that your diving into a pretty comprehensive
> ERP system, but one that is made up of what people have seen fit to
> contribute for free. An extremely wide variety of data structures
> and common business processes are represented in the system, though
> many are not complete, or at least not complete in the way your
> client will want to use them.
>
> The only way to really be sure is to document ALL business
> activities (usually easiest if organized by process and not by role
> or by system function), and then do an overlap/gap analysis to see
> how each business activity would be done in the system, or if there
> is not something to do it (or it is not adequate for what your users
> want) then detail what the system needs to do to help manage that
> activity. Once you've done that, then you'll know what the system
> can do for you as-is, and what needs to be done to expand and change
> the system to do what your client needs. Short of that, everything
> is a guess and guaranteed to be wrong (the only question is by how
> much and in which direction(s)...).
>
> To help with that I recommend this material (this is what I use

withclients):
>
> http://www.dejc.com/home/HEMP.html
>
> I'd also recommend looking at some of the generic business process
> stories that have come from OFBiz-based projects and been refined
> somewhat over the years (though keep in mind that these stories in
> some places represent activities that are not managed by OOTB OFBiz,
> ie these need an overlap/gap analysis document to make them more
meaningful):

>
> https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBREQDES/Universal
> +Business+Process+Library+Index
>
> Best of luck,
> -David
>
>
> On Sep 3, 2010, at 11:32 AM, Vadim Eisenberg wrote:
>
> > Hello BJ and other OfBiz developers,
> >
> > I was not subscribed to the mailing list so I did not receive the

answer
> > of BJ to my previous message -
> > <a href="http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/ofbiz-user/201009.mbox/%">http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/ofbiz-user/201009.mbox/%
> [hidden email]%3E
> > . Because of that I cannot post a response to it. Secondly, I used a
wrong
> > MIME in my previous message, so all the bullets and formatting were
> > missing. I am reposting the original message below in the right format


> > (any additional comments/opinions are welcome). In addition, my
response
> > to BJ follows. Sorry for the mess I created.
> >
> > Hi BJ,
> >
> > Thank you for your prompt response. I think I've got the general idea.

I
> > still would like to ask a question about learning OfBiz:
> > The three volumes of the data model book comprise about 1700 pages
> > together. Should I use the book as a reference or do I have to read
all
> > the three volumes before starting my work on OfBiz ? Which parts of
the

> > book are required before I begin my work ?
> >
> > Thanks & Regards,
> > Vadim
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > My original message:
> >
>

===========================================================================================================
> > Hello OfBiz developers,
> >
> > My name is Vadim Eisenberg and I work at IBM Research - Haifa, on the
> > UniversAAL project - http://universaal.org/. It is a consortium
European
> > project. Its goal is to create a platform for applications, services
and
> > devices for Ambient Assisted Living, that is a kind of "Smart Home"
for
> > senior citizens. As part of the platform, we - several software
developers
> > - have to develop an e-commerce site - uStore
> > http://universaal.org/index.php?
> option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=9&Itemid=21
> > . This site would be a one-stop-shop for software, services and
devices
> > for Ambient Assisted Living.
> >
> > We consider using OfBiz for implementation of uStore.
> >
> > I would like to ask you several questions about the features we want
to
> > implement. I would be glad to hear any information you can tell me
about
> > how hard could it be for us to implement these features. Please note
that
> > we have no prior experience with OfBiz.
> >
> > Any your thoughts, intuition, experience, advice about OfBiz/business
> > programming are welcome.
> >
> > In particular, the following information would help us very much :
> > How much work should be done by us in order to implement all the
features
> > that follow (Person/Months, Person/Years, for skilled OfBiz
> > developers/general software engineers). Which part would be to use
> > existing "extension" mechanisms of OfBiz and which part would be
actually
> > changing the OfBiz code ? Here your intuition/experience from related
> > projects is welcome, we do not need exact numbers, just a ballpark.
> > How much time the general software developers have to learn about
OfBiz
> > and how skilled in OfBiz  they should become in order to implement
these
> > features
> >
> >        E-commerce website features:
> > Using e-commerce site for selling software (such as AppStore of
iPhone)
> > and downloadable files in general (video, presentations of courses
etc.).
> > Here the issue is to manage links where the bought files could be
> > downloaded. The idea is to prevent a situation in which buyers would
buy a
> > software application, receive a link to it for downloading and share
the
> > link afterwards with anybody they want, so anybody would be able to
> > download the application without paying for it.
> > Using e-commerce site for selling services (human services and others)
> > Extending e-commerce site with general widgets, such as calendar,
clock,
> > map, a widget for downloading files, etc., and integrating the widgets


> > with the OfBiz
> >
> > Integration with other websites/services:
> > Integrating an e-commerce website with another (non-OfBiz backed) site

-
> > adding possibility for sellers to add products to the e-commerce site
via
> > the other site, to see customer feedback provided on the e-commerce
site
> > via the other site
> > Integrating an e-commerce website with another (possibly non-OfBiz)
> > e-commerce website, such as eBay/Amazon. What are the current
> > possibilities of integration with eBay ?
> > Integrating an e-commerce website with post/delivery services/sites
> >
> > Adding advanced features:
> > Adding support for signing business contracts between service
consumers
> > and service providers, between providers of different services etc.
via
> > the e-commerce site
> > Adding support for applying capability/requirement model, such as
> > JSR-124,  (for example  for matching between customer's requirements
and
> > capabilities of software, devices and services). The customer or
software
> > agent on behalf of the customer could provide his requirements as part

of
> > his account information, and the e-commerce solution would match
between
> > the products (according to their capabilities) and the requirements of

the
> > customers.
> > Has OfBiz a recommendation engine (providing recommendations to a user


> > based on his activity - searches, purchases, reviews etc.) ? If no,
how
> > hard would it be to add it ?
> > Can the OfBiz-based e-commerce web site be presented by browsers of
smart
> > phones  ? How hard would it be to enable it ?
> > Changing search/recommendations of OfBiz to be based on the
requirements
> > of the customer
> > Changing search/recommendations of OfBiz to be based on the
geolocation of
> > the customer
> > Adding support for customization of products/services and changes in
the
> > prices according to the customization during the purchase process
> > Adding support for a composition solution of hardware, software and
human
> > services (bundles, kits). A seller could compose a new product by
> > combining several existing products
> > Adding support for manual approval of products by site administrators
> > before submission of the products to the e-commerce site
> > Adding support for managing versions of the software applications that

are
> > sold on the e-commerce website
> >
> > Sorry for so many questions and sorry if some of them are out of
context.

> >
> > Best Regards,
> > Vadim
> > -------------------------------
> > Vadim Eisenberg
> > IT for Healthcare & Life Sciences
> > IBM Research - Haifa
> >
> >
>