ASF Board Report 2008-06

Report for June 2008 for OFBiz (Open For Business) as a top level project.

The Apache Open For Business Project (Apache OFBiz) is an open source enterprise automation software project. By enterprise automation we mean: ERP, CRM, E-Business / E-Commerce, MRP, SCM, CMMS/EAM, and so on.

We have no issues that require Board assistance at this time.

Community:

• There have been no new committers or PMC members since the last report.
• With some new objectives (see the Project section below) we have created more opportunity for people to get involved in the project, and various prospective committers have stepped up and helped with these opening the way to various nominations for new committers.
• The pool of committers added a few months ago is doing quite well and a few are even involved in driving new development and helping out with other efforts and general maintenance as well.

Project:

• In order to have something with a reasonable scope to work toward for a release we have identified the framework as a priority to target for refactoring and cleanup, general and automated testing, and for certain new features to round it out. A framework-only release will be coming along in a few months, possibly before the next report, but planned at the latest for before ApacheCon in November. As with any community effort this means different things to different contributors, but all together things are shaping up to create a good offering and modernize certain parts of the project, like using more AJAX and client-side scripting for example.
• The opportunity to have an OFBiz Symposium @ ApacheCon for the USA 2008 event is an exciting motivator for many people and organizations already involved in OFBiz to work together to increase awareness of the project, and promote the many business concerns that make it possible for people to stay involved in the project as well. The plan is for 2 training courses (one 2-day, one 1-day), along with 12 conference sessions and 4 BOF sessions on Wednesday and Thursday. The timeline for planning this is short, but with various volunteers already lined up and many other prospects and groups looking at how they can be involved it is looking like we'll be able to fill up these offerings.