What people have to say about Apache OFBiz

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)

I like to take a little credit for OFBiz. The project had its beginnings in a company that I founded a couple of years ago. We really had no idea about the direction we wanted to go until we hired David Jones as our chief software architect. He took care of us then and he continues to take care of us now. Unfortunately, our little startup had the same problem as many others - it didn't last. We have all moved on to other things.

One thing remains constant however - we are all using OFBiz in our new pursuits.

David and his team have taken those snippets of code and built a sophisticated project that can run just about any business. I am amazed at what OFBiz can do now and what its promise for the future is.

My company, Partner Homes, builds houses with the direct involvement of our customer in a homebuilding role. Many of our clients have no experience in building homes - we"re training them the whole way. 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.

Live site: Partner Homes
Stephen Loosli (stephen@partnerhomes.com)
President, Partner Homes (www.partnerhomes.com)

We first started using OFBiz for a music retail and wholesale site combined and was so impressed with it that we decided to build a hosting and service company based around the OFBiz platform. It's ease of customizations, development and design were just some of the key factors that lead us to working with OFBiz. The ability to offer our accounts a feature rich eBusiness suite out of the box is making us look like heroes to our small and mid size business customers.

Most of our accounts had the need and desire for sophisticated eBusiness applications, but just could not justify the cost of other business suites. They were very receptive to the OFBiz value and were excited to have eBusiness tools to offer their customers and sales staff.

We highly recommend web developers and web designers that have cost conscience customers to develop OFBiz sites. The future looks very exciting.

I (we) are currently using at least the Entity Engine portion of ofbiz in a production application. I have planned to evaluate/include other portions of the project as soon as I have the time to do so. My company, Vision Information Services, is in the supply chain management, Vendor managed Inventory, and Retail systems management. Unfortunately, all of our current web sites that utilize ofbiz are not public. The public site is not written in Java and is very old (not too exciting). If anyone is looking for supply chain/retail solutions though, feel free to contact us! Our customers range from large home entertainment suppliers to large retailers.

We really appreciate everything that you've put into the ofbiz package, and hopefully as we get more familiar we will be able to make some valuable contributions to the project.

Tim Kosacek (tkosacek at domain visioninfo.com)
Software Architect, Vision Information Services (www.visioninfo.com)

I have noticed that the deployed shopping cart has needed minimal upkeep from us.

It has been argued that OFBiz is "too much framework for what we need", but one of the greatest benefits that I have seen is that when multiple modules are using the same framework and data model, a common vocabulary develops. I can go and ask about a module I have no experience with, and as soon as they start talking about "work efforts" and "contact methods", I immediately understand 90% of what they are doing. They don't have to spend time developing/explaining their data schemas. I believe that it has saved us time already, and that it will save us more time as projects mature and new projects deploy.

One of our key marketing points is our ability to quickly "brand" a product with a new customers look and feel and then deploy it fairly quickly. The OFBiz framework has much of this ability already built in.

We could have developed the things that OFBiz offers, but if a tool exists, why build the tool from scratch? We have been able to concentrate on new features rather than concentrate on whether or not the controller we just built is working correctly.

Deployed Shopping Cart (in use since Q1 2002) - $60 Million Company
Deployed Shopping Cart and User Tools - $40 Million Company

Live site: Discovery Toys
Ken Fultz (ken.fultz@icentris.com)
Vice-President of Information Technology, iCentris, Inc (www.icentris.com)

I am working for a service company called Telaside, just created (www.telaside.com).

I started studying and using ofbiz 3 months ago, while building a proposal for an e-commerce site here in France (budget between 250 000 - 350 000€). Our answer was a mix between ofbiz for the e-commerce 'plumbing' and an opensource content management solution for the visual front office parts. The customer was a big company, we were short listed, but they preferred a 100% Microsoft/.NET solution.

Nevertheless, I was convinced enough of the huge ofbiz potential that we built another proposal, for a customer selling on-line lessons mainly to people who would like to learn about arts, food, wine and so on. The budget is quite different, the global envelope is about 15000 Euros. We won the deal, so I started developing on the ofbiz platform.

So a first point I would like to emphasize is that whatever big is the targeted site, ofbiz can be an answer.

How have I overcome the obstacles and supported the important things for my organization?

• The site I am developing is a mix and match of the principles found in ofbiz, so I did not have to change a lot of things. The big difference is mainly that a product is a lesson, and there is a schedule attached to it. I am linking a product to a fixed asset (already existing) but modified a couple of things here and there in order to be as close to my needs as I can. For example I've modified the order cancellation process in order to decrement the seats occupation in the fixed asset calendar, the checkAvailability() of the ShoppingCart not to compare with now() but with the fromDate of the fixedassetproduct, otherwise my future lessons are never available (the same apply for the createOrder() dates filtering), the filterByDate method of the EntityUtil class to include the given date instead of using only after or before, for the same reason...etc.
• One important thing that I know now is to always look at what has been done in the code before trying to do it from scratch. Often, somewhere, there is a bsh file, a service, a static method or something else probably waiting to be called and that will do nearly what I am looking for. And if it does not, then a combination of elements will probably answer my question. 'Study a lot, code a little' is in one of the docs. I totally agree with that!
• Also, the fact that I was involved with Si in the entity test engine suite helped me a lot discovering the entity engine features. Need less to say that it was a great help. So helping the community helps you also. That is a very important point I think.
• The book 'The Data Model Resource Book' is also a must have, in order to understand the data model.
• There is quite a learning curve, that is sure. But the efforts really worth it. There is so much to win using all those technologies.
• This community model is really interesting. It's very pleasant to work and share with people all around the world.