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What people have to say about Apache OFBiz...

I am amazed at what OFBiz can do now and what its promise for the future is.
We use OFBiz to tie our projects together with sophisticated task management designed for the amateur homebuilder (built on the WorkEffort module). In fact, our entire organization, from top to bottom, is run on OFBiz.
I wouldn't have it any other way.

We exploring OFBiz in 2003 and are now running our entire online retail business with OFBiz, from online and phone sales to inventory, purchasing, shipping, and accounting. We've found that OFBiz is an extremely advanced and flexible platform that is well-suited to the ever-changing needs of a growing company.
Just as importantly, we've found that there is a strong development community which is actively moving OFBiz forward, and becoming a part of this community has been critical to our success with OFBiz.

See the Case Study from Integral Business Solutions about their projects based on OFBiz, especially recent work they have done for the US Air Force.
Here is a quote from the document:
"Integral started using OFBiz to develop a web-based Document Management System and has subsequently used it to deploy a number of automation solutions to the United States Air Force. This case study focuses on one of our recently deployed applications that went from prototype to production in six months. The primary enabler in deploying the application so quickly was OFBiz."

Download the complete document here.
Chris Chesney (cchesney@go-integral.com)
Chief Systems Architect, Integral Business Solutions (www.go-integral.com)

Codesquare Helix is a complete warehouse inventory and sales system. It takes the power of the OFBIZ backend and adds a Java based desktop client interface. This provides an easily installable client that lets customers determine what aspects of OFBIZ are made available to its operators. By making use of a chat client to traffic serialized inventory processing requests, Helix can support multiple client installations asynchronously.
The main aspects of the Helix client are management of warehouse items, locations, use of hand-held scanners, point of sale, and order fulfillment. The user interface can be highly customized for each type of business and allows the addition of a business logic layer that makes decisions before any information is sent to or retrieved from the OFBIZ backend.
Codesquare Helix has also made use of the OFBIZ web site capabilities to provide an online sales portal that is linked to the warehouse inventory. The web site content delivery system has been modified to provide greater support for stylesheets to improve customization of sites.
Finally, another application, Helix RNA, synchronizes the web site and warehouse systems to provide integrated order fulfillment capabilities. At specified intervals, it replicates the inventory and order data from the central OFBIZ database and any satellite databases used to support Helix based web sites. This allows for truly scalable and distributed data management and delivery.

We are a multi channel retail services business selling through stores across the United Kingdom and over the Internet. We have ambitions to extend this to television, mobile phones and gaming consoles in the future. We have been using Ofbiz to provide key services for our business for some years with lots of success. We combine it with Postgres and run it on legacy hardware and have consistently had very high availability from the earliest days.
We originally started working with Ofbiz because it provided us with the full e commerce services that we needed at the time. Since then, as extra functionality has been added, we have incorporated it into our enterprise as fast as possible. We are still doing this and try to keep up to date with stable releases for our live system. We have some in house technical support but have made regular use of the services available (both for free and at a cost) within the Ofbiz community. We contributed both documentation and some of the localisation for the United Kingdom. This has been built on by others in the community.
We also run the ofbiz.co.uk community group although this is not too active at the moment. Our technical efforts tend to be concentrated in bursts as we are dedicate a time period to the business. Besides our own implementation we have managed two other company implementations which are currently live. We are strong in project management and business analysis with experience within financial services, telecommunications, retail and channel management. We are constantly looking for partners with whom to deliver new and interesting projects.

Powerful, flexible, and free...what more could a developer ask for? When I began work on sharing information between retail Point of Sale systems and online stores, my client had already selected a commercial shopping cart. We quickly dropped it and went with OFBiz because it was much easier to import and export data, and access to the actual code made making modifications a breeze.
For our first OFBiz project, we uploaded over 4000 products from a POS system. We added 4 variants to each product for a total of over 8000 products. The category structures and keyword search allow users to quickly find the products they are looking for.
www.SignatureNutrition.com was our second OFBiz project. We uploaded over 700 products from a POS system with products having multiple price values such as MSRP, default price, and sales price. Through the backend administration tools we were able to easily add promotions and dynamic pricing. We also added complex shipping calculations that start at a base rate and shift to a percentage of the order total, with free shipping if the order total is over $200.
I find it a little ironic that the support I've received for OFBiz is usually better than support for commercial products. Co-founders David Jones and Andy Zeneski respond quickly to most messages posted on the project mailing list, and they actually know their product (unlike many helpdesk agents I've been stuck on the phone with). I love that the project is based on Best Practices data models and programming patterns. I have worked with several different eCommerce systems, including IBM's net.commerce, and I believe OFBiz is right up there with the best of them.

Live site: First Endurance
Sterling Okura (info@nowpulse.com)
President, NowPulse (www.nowpulse.com)