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We have sample configurations for many different app servers, and configuring new ones is not difficult. There are no licensing fees for OFBiz, so you don't have to worry about increasing your price or costs.

Some questions and anwsers collected on user ML

Reports & analytics capabilities

OFBiz currently has a few dozens pre-written reports OOTB, and more can be added using the OFBiz tools, or an external reporting tool (which is still very common, ie companies that use something like Crystal Reports or Business Objects will use that with their OFBiz applications). OFBiz has tools in the framework to facilitate building of user interfaces, and these same tools are used for building reports. This provides a high level of efficiency, and allows developers to use the same tools they are used to... and in some cases scripts and other things can even be reused in reports.

OFBiz also includes some BI infrastructure to support defining and populating star schemas, which can then be used for ad-hoc or pre-written reports. A limited star schema exists, and work is going on to extend it.

Integration and Interoperability (SOA Architecture, Web Services offered)

The OFBiz logic layer is itself a Service-Oriented tool, and all primary logic in OFBiz is implemented as services. Many of these services can be exposed externally as web services automatically, and the more complex ones can be exposed as web services (or call web services) through web services code that maps to them.

Usability (for final customers, and administrators)

Usability is very subjective, but I'll try to answer in a helpful way.

OFBiz is often customized for larger organizations, and in those cases the best usability is achieved by analyzing processes and then building user interfaces to directly support those processes. This results in something specific to end-user requirements and is far better than any OOTB user interface that even the best designers could create without specific requirements.

That is the main design goal behind OFBiz: easy customization since the only way to get a really good UI is to do so based on very specific requirements... and those requirements tend to change dramatically betweenorganizations, in many cases even organizations in the same industry.

The OOTB user interfaces are primarily meant for easy reuse in custom user interfaces, so they mostly avoid automating any specific process and are instead meant to fit into any process desired. However, using the OOTB interfaces is pretty common and is usually best done by documenting where and how to do common tasks according to the processes of the organization. In other words, instead of creating a custom UI when you are on a tighter budget you can simply document how to use the OOTB interfaces, and while not usually excellent this way it is quite adequate for smaller organizations and gives them more functionality and ability to automate things than they would have in most software, allowing them to avoid large numbers of spreadsheets and such. Overall this results in tools to keep track and automate organizational information that are far more efficient and usable that a hodge-podge of various systems.

Personalization potential

Personalization is an extremely general term, broadly meaning behavior or data that changes according to the user. There are hundreds of features in OFBiz ecommerce and the OFBiz back-end (manager) apps that
would fit this description. Please feel free to send over more details and I (or others) will be happy to comment on them.

Multidevice sites available?

It is pretty easy to build sites targeted at different devices, and there are some available OOTB. If by "device" you mean a specific UI then the hhfacility component is a good example. If by "device" you mean specific hardware control (like cash drawers and CC scanners), then the pos component (point-of-sale) has some good stuff.

Accessibility considered?

There could be 2 acceptations here

• Ergonomy
  • In ecommerce the templates are often changed so much that accessibility ends up more in the hands of the designers and developers who customize the system (so make sure you have a good service provider!). The OOTB ecommerce templates do a pretty good job of this by using styled text instead of images, alt-text on images, and so on.
  • For the OOTB back-end functionality, accessibility is considered, and to be maintained it must be considered in customizations. These are primarily web-based applications and to improve accessibility are very text-heavy, etc.
  • Note also that OFBiz backend is able to be read from let to right or right to left (try Chinese or Arab languages to check)
• For disabled persons
  • We did some effort in the backend part of OFBiz. Sight disabled persons should be able to work with OFBiz without too much pain. For instance, following Jeffrey Zeldman's excellent advices in his "Designing with Web Standards" book (see our books page for details) we have implemented an access key to skip navigation and go diretly to content area. This concept could be extended of course...