Posted by
David Garrett on
Oct 12, 2005; 9:25am
URL: http://ofbiz.116.s1.nabble.com/OFBiz-Users-Application-for-industry-regulator-tp136104p136112.html
Ian,
I have done a directory of businesses for an industry organisation.
The listings were implemented as products with extensions to the product
table for the contact and party info. Control of what could be edited used
the limited category admin permissions. We had a few options here - we
finally implemented a category for each user who needed to admin specific
products and used the Limited admin party role so that this user could edit
only the products in that category. Therefore this association needs to be
established. (Hope that made sense)
The public UI used the ecommerce category/product view mechanism. Th admin
site had simplified maintenance pages.
All this was done in one instance.
-----Original Message-----
From:
[hidden email] [mailto:
[hidden email]]
On Behalf Of Ian Gilbert
Sent: Tuesday, 11 October 2005 9:43 AM
To:
[hidden email]
Subject: [OFBiz] Users - Application for industry regulator ...
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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