Hi Paul,
I believe I'm currently doing it for a small business as well.
You'll need to customize. Customization in this case involves defaulting many values and code
execution paths for a more condensed workflow. That is, you can cut out some unnecessary steps in
the workflow and also auto-populate default values for some fields (or leave them blank and unused).
I propose that we work together on this? I have yet to hit the accounting and GL side of things. I
have figured out the ecommerce (PO, SO) and product configuration side of things, though. And also
manufacturing, because my boss does manufacture stuff.
You'll find that being a novice Java developer is ALL you need to be, the framework is that easy
to use. Well, you also need acute reverse-engineering skills because the only way you'll find out
how things work is by diving into the framework source codes (see GenericDelegator.java for
entity-related functions). No docs. Community is too being moving OFBiz forward rapidly.
In fact, you may find it easily initially to use Java instead of Minilang. Java is a lot more
documented than Minilang.
Tell you what. I can offer you very quick answers to "how do I do this or that". I'm a
reverse-engineer by trade; I have small crack teams that mathematically take apart legacy system
codes to break vendor-lock for my clients. So, figuring out OFBiz, given that it's opensource no
less, is really... an interesting exercise, not a tedious impractical one.
You can help me with your accounting knowledge. (Yes, help me!! I beg you!)
How about that?
One warning, though. There are quite a few bugs in OFBiz. They're small issues if you can dive in
to fix them yourself. But if you're waiting for the community to fix them, you could be looking at
weeks before a patch goes in, especially for non-trivial fixes that take time to review/audit. I'm
currently holding quite a number of fixes in-house, not yet reviewed by community and merged back
into OFBiz.
I'm deploying a customized system for my boss inside of 1 month. And he has quite a bit of
customizations to do, particularly for the manufacturing side of things. Oh, the Manufacturing
module is very feature-rich (thanks Jacopo!), just that my boss has special needs. I'd say we
could work together and customize OFBiz for you inside of 2 weeks?
Jonathon
Paul Gear wrote:
Hi folks,
I'm looking at different accounting/business management packages for use
in my small business, and i was excited when i found how comprehensive
and easy to install opentaps was.
However, it is a daunting application for the beginner, and it leads me
to ask: is it asking for trouble trying to use it as a small business
accounting package? My requirements are fairly simple: invoicing
(services only, no inventory), general ledger, and GST tracking for the
Australian tax system.
I'm a novice Java developer, so i can get through most basic problems
OK, but understanding the framework is a bit more complex an
undertaking. Am i just creating work for myself thinking that i can use
OFBiz/opentaps for my small business?
Thanks in advance,
Paul
<http://paulgear.webhop.net>
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