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New Features Roadmap - Living Document

The long term goal of the OFBiz project is to build a complete, features set rich, universal and configurable "enterprise automation software" (ERP, CRM, CMMS, MRP etc.).
OFBiz is one of the few applications of this type developed by a community, rather than one corporation.
Even if the final long term goal is clear and well-defined ("building a universal enterprise automation software"), the short and medium term tasks to accomplish it are not.

The following is a proposal for the definition of a list of short and medium term tasks list: your input, suggestions and help is welcome. Please add your comment at the bottom of the page.

Legenda:

  • "People interested": the people that think that the feature should be considered a priority for the project (in the short term)
  • "People willing to help": persons that are in the position to help with the development of the task; if possible specify an approximately number of hours per week or month to give an idea of the total resources available for each task

Implement Human Resource Application

Enhance employee profile management, Add support for employee loyalty program, continues training management, cost to company management, salary statement report, implement security so employee can manage their account.

See the project's specific page here

People interested: Anil Patel

People willing to help: Anil Patel

Implement Recruitment application 

Add a special purpose application for managing recruitment in a company.

See the project specific page OFBIZ:Recruitment applicationhere

People interested: Anil Patel

People willing to help: Anil Patel

Implement Asset management application 

Add a special purpose application for managing assets in a company.

See the project specific page here

People interested: Anil Patel

People willing to help: Anil Patel

Implement Project Management Application

Implement project management application (designed for service companies like the most common ones who use ofbiz: lots of clients and projects and a steady stream of tasks to manage across multiple roles and teams); this is a specialpurpose app built (mostly) on the WorkEffort component

This component is nor pretty much finished.

See the project's specific page here.

People interested: David Jones, Hans Bakker, Anil Patel, Pierre Smits
People willing to help: Hans Bakker, Anil Patel

Complete the implementation of the Accounting component

Finish implementation of the OFBiz accounting component, both the auto-posting to GL services and a nice complete set of reports (the 4 standard accounting 101 type reports plus a complete set of financial metrics)

See the project's specific page here.

People interested: David Jones, Jacopo Cappellato, Scott Gray, Jim Barrows, Anil Patel
People willing to help: Jacopo Cappellato, Scott Gray, Jim Barrows, Anil Patel

Implement Automated Tests for the most common processes

Implement a set of service-level test cases that go through the most common high-level processes in the system, like the ones documented in the role oriented documentation on docs.ofbiz.org; these will help have some sort of regression tests that are widely applicable, even if UIs are customized, and should cover many service-level customizations with little or no test case changes too

People interested: David Jones, Jacopo Cappellato, Anil Patel
People willing to help: Anil Patel

Continue the development of the integrated component for Business Intelligence

Continue the work started in the specialpurpose "Business Intellicence" component: Implement new dimensions (Ship-To-Customer, Warehouse, Promotion, Store etc...) and data migration services; implement new facts and starschemas; improve the reporting tools (possibly including an external tool for dimensional reports).

People interested: Jacopo Cappellato
People willing to help: Jacopo Cappellato (4 hours per week)

Complete the support for VAT (Value-Added-Tax)

See the project's specific page here.

People interested: Jacques Le Roux, Jacopo Cappellato, Marco Risaliti, Pierre Smits
People willing to help: Marco Risaliti, Jacques Le Roux, Hans Bakker

Add support for online contextual help

People interested: Hans Baker, Sharan Foga, Jacques Le Roux
People willing to help: Hans Baker, Sharan Foga, Jacques Le Roux

Sharan said today (2014/01/28) that she wants to continue to help.

Today (2014/01/28) also I merged the trunk HEAD in the  branch https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/ofbiz/branches/webhelp-2012-12-07 I created for the works Tom burns did on the to be embedded new help https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-4941. I will continue to support it...

Screen and Form widget enhancements

See the project specific page here

People interested: Anil Patel
People willing to help: Anil Patel, Nicolas Malin

Improve the Content Management Component

have a content management system which is comparable, in terms of features, to the more popular open source content management applications

People interested:
People willing to help:

Improve the SFA Component

have a SFA/CRM which is comparable, in terms of features, to the more popular open source SFA/CRM applications

People interested: Hans Baker, Pierre Smits, Jacques Le Roux
People willing to help: Hans Baker, Jacques Le Roux

Ecommerce component enhancements

See the project specific page here

People interested: Anil Patel, Jacques Le Roux
People willing to help: Anil Patel, Jacques Le Roux

Improve SEO with https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-5312 and its related branch https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/ofbiz/branches/OFBIZ-5312-ofbiz-ecommerce-seo-2013-10-23

Complete the refactoring of Permissions control

People interested: Jacopo Cappellato, Andrew Zeneski
People willing to help: Jacopo Cappellato (2 hours per week)

Complete the migration of older bsh/ftl files to widgets

People interested: Jacopo Cappellato
People willing to help: Jacopo Cappellato (2 hours per week), Nicolas Malin

Change the Entity Engine to be user aware for security, logging

This would be a change to require that a userLogin be passed to all Entity Engine calls. The Entity Engine could then check permissions to see if the user can modify or view that entity, or that record. The Entity Engine could also auto-populate fields like created by and updated by.

There are big downsides to this in that it is a real pain to ALWAYS have to know which user is doing stuff, and lots of our services don't know who the user is or use the "system" user to get around security constraints. The same thing would have to happen if we did this for the EE. This would also require major API refactoring, which we would probably want to precede with a big reduction in API size, as has been started but isn't yet finished.

Maybe the API refactoring wouldn't be necessary if we created a user-aware decorator for the GenericDelegator.

Backend widget & application HTML clean-up

People interested: Jacques Le Roux
People willing to help: Jacques Le Roux, Paul Piper

See https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-5040

Manufacturing improvement

People interested: Pierre Smits
People willing to help: Pierre Smits

Especially regarding lifecycle mgt of recipes (BoM and production schema) and on in-situ adding materials, production resources and outputs of end and by-products (like we had the discussion on dev ML about in September 2013).

Expense Declaration

People interested: Pierre Smits
People willing to help: Pierre Smits

See https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-5473

Ivy integration

People interested: Pierre Smits
People willing to help: Pierre Smits

Seehttps://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-5464

Solr integration

People interested: Jacques Le Roux
People willing to help: Jacques Le Roux

See https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-5042

Theme framework (Bootstrap, Zurb, etc.) integration (for both back and frontend)

People interested: Jacques Le Roux
People willing to help: Jonatan Soto

http://markmail.org/message/i7fnxid55cq5uiiz

UI (User Interface) enhancements

People interested: Jacques Le Roux
People willing to help: Jacques Le Roux, Nicolas Malin

Links in screenlets.

  • Have less (or even none) buttons in header
  • It was also suggesteed to use screenlet like how gmail does. Notably
    • Three buttons max
    • Dropdown for other actions
    • The idea of duplicating at bottom
  • Having breadcrumbs under the title bar
  • Using portlets in place of screenlets
  • Recently (12/08) it was discussed if we should remove the screenlet's navigation-form-name attribute. There are (at least) 3 reasons for that
    • Less informations/features than with default (pages numbers, ability to jump to any page)
    • The last button does not always work (try with widget.form.defaultViewSize=2 when listing invoices)
    • Pagination should be available to the user always in the same way in order to have a consistent UI.
      Then we have 2 possibilities
      1. Remove this attribute and all current uses.
      2. Keep it but then
        1. we should at least make it works (last button issue)
        2. make it consistent with the standard way (direct page access)

List

To have in the results list form of every FindScreen (optionally) a first column of check boxes that let the user to select several items and than a combo box above the list that let the user to select a command to execute on them.

Applications Tabs (Std Theme)

  • Sorting
    • The tabs should be sortable not only by alphabetical order in English but in other languages too.
    • An user should to be able to position the tabs according to their preference
  • Having something to select the apps desired for a "quick links" bar, and maybe have that go beyond just tabbed applications and include individual pages for easy access.
    We still need that for 'old' themes but it looks like they will be deprecated with new themes like Bizness Time...

Quicker an intuitive access to basic functionnalities

Following Bruno's suggestion about Compiere UI. We could put a link to https://localhost:8443/partymgr/control/createnew everywhere we have a party lookup, using the party label at left of the field. Actually we could generalize everywhere we have a lookup for something.
It's easy to click on the Party tab and then on "Create New". But after reading BJ's reading suggestion, it's also an easy way to teach newbies how to do it. Easy for us to introduce, and easy for newbies to use, maybe with a tooltip "click on party to create". This would fill the Condition #2 of the BJ's article above.
Of course being able to show the screen where the choice of the type of party to create is done, and then the screen where data are entered in an Ajax filled CSS hidden/shown window could be our next target. This would allow to not leave the page the user is on and would create a less disturbing environment.

For a first effort, it was suggested that tools tips that direct the user to the necessary steps would be sufficient. Like "create new ($whatever) by clicking on ($whatever1) tab and click on ($whatever2) link" could make the tooltip a template and ($whaterver1-2) is the only things that is a variable. Of course then you can enhance the tool tip to handle links. Then you could just modify the I8N files without touching code "Click here to ($whatever)"
The tooltips labels could be in there own file for an entity. A class that would bes similar to the one that maintains the DB tables can be hooked into Create of the file to add the tooltips. This could be set to defaults based on the Field type.

Now we have the ability to put parms into the label in the I8N files, so the tooltips would have the same ability. Like "Click here to ($whatever)" would turn into "Click here to see the productlist" as a tool tip. You would just have the fieldname like in the labels file.
Barring having a seperate file, then having the tooltip_$fieldname like tooltip_$Phonenumber would work.

 

Some i18n issues and best practices

  • Typography : Typography depends on languages. For instance in French we put a space before and after colons, there are other cases of course. So punctuation should be always part of labels.
  • HTML : We already discussed about not putting any HTML tags in labels. Also we should not put any < and & which would not be correctly rendered (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#dt-chardata), so should be escaped.

Some suggestions on user ML

  • better error/success messages
  • better handling of keyboard tab to move from one field to another
  • more and better multi row submit screens
  • more informative form fields (e.g. showing descriptions instead of just ids)
  • enhancing field interactions (the value of one field can change/ hide/ etc other elements/data in the screen)
  • I add something like in SugarCRM: their "info icon" which when you hover over it show related information (for a contact its contact mechs, etc.)
  • No labels