Posted by
Ian Gilbert on
Oct 11, 2005; 12:42am
URL: http://ofbiz.116.s1.nabble.com/OFBiz-Users-Application-for-industry-regulator-tp136104.html
Good evening list :)
I am hoping to use Ofbiz as a base for an industry regulator. It has the
following characteristics.
1. There are 100 member companies. 80 of these are unique whilst the
others are 'branches' of other members. These are nearly all importer
organisations.
2. The requirement is to allow 'members' to add product and company
information for the production of a 'catalog'. Historically this catalog
has been printed out once a year and sent to members. It is more a list
of members information than a list of product information but they would
like to include some of this information in the printed catalog and allow
access to the other information through the website.
3. Access to this information would be via subscription (I think that
this might work in the same way as the subscription service to access the
Ofbiz docs) which is all the 'ecommerce' portion of the site would sell
(i.e. it would not sell the products from all the different companies).
4. It is possible, although is not an initial requirement, that the
member companies might employ other functional business modules of Ofbiz.
5. Although many of these companies source unique items, there are a
number of products that are shared amongst member stores. In addition to
this, items are traded between stores. In some cases the suppliers of
these stores have inventory that they would like displayed (and will pay
for this).
I am aware that support for Multi-companies in Ofbiz is not supported out
of the box and I agree with this position.
Is Ofbiz the correct choice for this deployment? I have run Ofbiz for a
couple of small orgs in single company mode for some time but am having
some problems working out the implications. There seem to be several
options that I could adopt. I would like to get the opinions of those on
the list before starting.
The options that I see are:
1. Use multiple instances of Ofbiz, one for each company, draw the
company contact information as well as any product information from
separate databases (probably going in 'above' Ofbiz). Allow the
proprietors of the stores to maintain their own information (there is a
definite UI implication here).
2. Use multiple instances of Ofbiz, one for each company, but store only
company information in this. Have another instance - 'Industry Regulator'
which contains the product information. In the future populate the
websites of the companies with products drawn from the 'Regulator'
instance (probably using WS). Give each 'proprietor' access to their own
products and maybe separate these using categories. Advantage is that
products are centralised making reporting easier. Disadvantage is that
this seems a complex method of doing it and would require careful analysis
of the 'roles' allocated to proprietors (this is probably unavoidable
though). In this case the actual company specific instances could be
gradually made available by module as the subscription model is developed
(e.g. For the lowest level of subs you would just be able to add people to
your system through the 'Party Manager' thereby giving them the ability to
add/modify/delete product info in the main instance whilst a higher level
might give you a trading site etc.,). There remains issues with the UI as
NONE of these proprietors will be happy with conf file maintenance. I am
happy to do this for three instances but 100? This may cause maintenance
problems.
3. Store the company details in a separate database and manage everything
through one 'Regulator' instance. This would have the advantage of being
very simple but wouldn't be able to exploit the other elements of the
system unless we made a large number of mods which would, inevitably,
permanently fork our setup - something I am not keen to do as we lack
resource to support this even in the medium term.
Writing this has been useful. I am now favouring number two but would
value other opinions and comment. I will be happy to provide further
information on our setup if this would be considered helpful.
Thanks and very best wishes
Ian
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