Page History

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• Project Vision: Do we all have the same vision and understanding of OFBiz and where it is going ? / Which direction do they want to project to go in? / What do they see as important?
• Project Strategies: What strategies are currently in place? (e.g Communication, Risk, Issue Management ,etc)
• Planning: Is there a Roadmap or High Level Plan?
• Main Areas of Focus: What is the overall planare the main areas the project is working on
• Organisation: How is the project being managed, controlled and organised

Discussion: Pariticipant's Current and Future Project Vision

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Youssef's vision was that OFBiz was a framework used to build solutions because not many companies could use OFBiz "out of the box". Trying to make OFBiz an out of the box solution that could work for everyone will be too hard.The applications that are there need to include contextual help and integrated testing tools across the complete global process.

Original Project Vision:

Jacopo mentioned that the original vision of the OFBiz was to have an application development framework with some skeleton applications that would be customised per implementation. Over the years because of contributions from the community these 'skeleton' applications have become more and more complete.

Project Strategies

Sharan talked about the different strategies that projects generally have in place that she wanted to investigate for the project.

Communication:

• Curently the mailing lists, website and wiki are the main communication tools. Jacopo as PMC chair prepares project reports to the ASF on a regular basis.
• We want to encourage more business users into the community so need to tailor the website and wiki.
• We have found that meeting in person at events such as Apachecon have been really good in building community as well as communication links. What other

Risk Management - Not sure there is anything currently in place

Issue Management - currently managed by JIRA

Task Management - currently managed by JIRA (Need to loo

Planning and Project Roadmap

Currently there

Draft Proposals to be raised for community feedback / concensus

• Tidy up OFBiz technical framework or "kernel" link
• Define and implement a process to manage the cleaned code eg to a sandbox location so could be used by users who want to pick it up and use
• Tidy up / clean up OFBiz business framework (e.g. ensure business processes have a use case to describe the process and that can be used for validation)
• OFBiz in application documentation - have been using docbook but two other proposals mentioned
  • Idea 1: Use SVNPUB: This is committer controlled but may be able to switch to setup a business user expert with write access. This means that the "mini subject matter experts" could easier maintain their specific areas.
  • Idea 2: Wikipedia style documentation where a page linked within the OFBiz application page (e.g. using the '?') will link to the wiki. This is more open and non committer controlled. Means more people can contribute
• External dependencies refactoring
• Build a Roadmap / High level plan that will be used to show details of releases and how they are supported, details of work in development, updates planned. Need to look at tools available eg. JIRA has options to do planning and roadmap, also look for Roadmap and planning info on the Wiki as may be able to collate
• Ensure business success stories are documented (as this is valuable info for potential users). Ask users  to add their stories and also get them to list the applications used / implemented. Existing policy is that there should be no direct links from OFBiz website main pages so need to use the wiki. Investigate whether integraters are willing to share their client links and stories.
• Marketing OFBiz - prepare an end user demo that can be based on roles (e.g accountant, HR manager, Order Clerk, Warehouse Manager etc). Link to user stories that can have a script or supporting documentation (e.g currently on main page there are no instructions about how to login to the demo just in case you are thrown out. Also default user if flexadmin which doesnt have all the permissions for all applications).
• Common Core Marketing Material - Put together some standard OFBiz marketing information that all integrators / users have access to. Integrators can then adapt it to suit their needs if required. Information could be white papers around supported industries etc. Need to define what tool could be used to prepare the material as it needs to be accessible to a common audience. This is important as everyone will need to be able to edit it!
• Maintenance - eg. Tomcat etc. Need to keep a watching brief on external products that are directly used by OFBiz
• Establish a group of  "mini subject matter experts" both business and technical (i.e. dont have to be both but can be). Identify contributors and knowledge. Can refer to these people regarding their specific area
• Work on a strategy to encourage more business users
• Look at the testing strategy - unit testing in isolation is not enough. We need to ensure there is an full end to end test flow
• OFBiz branding and trademarks - need to review the process and contact sites that may be infringing this
  
  

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