Hi Jonathon and Paul,
Could I dive in here and say I'm currently trying to get a working model
up and running that I could demo to small business clients in the UK.
OFbiz looks so beautifully designed from the ground up, streets ahead of
the competition and adaptable to almost any situation from running a
one-man consultancy to a multinational enterprise.
It looks like the most awesome super-car you've ever seen. I can't
believe everybody won't want one.
As Jonathon says, the community seems entirely focussed on moving
forward rapidly and winning the next Le Mans. Which is how it should be.
Imo this explains the lack of docs and the small bugs. The mass of
available documentation is actually almost as awesome as the framework
itself. Problem is that it is all aimed at engineers who need to
understand how it works ... not how to work it. Enough workshop manuals
to fill shelves in the garage, but no simple driver handbooks you can
put in the glove compartment.
This is a very fundamental difference. An entirely opposite point of view.
Try talking to the average driver about the thermodynamics of combustion
and they glaze over in seconds. They neither need nor want to know. They
simply want to drive it. They pay the garage to take care of all that
for them so they can free themselves up to deal with other things - like
where to drive to.
It's the little, superficial things that are most important. How does
the door latch sound? Where is the gear shift and indicator switch? How
often does it break down?
This is true for all levels of users. More so in fact for the President
of a large Corporation to whom image arriving at the golf club is
everything, than to the small businessman in the street who accepts he
may have to get his hands dirty occasionally.
Winning the Le Mans is obviously a huge selling point and an essential
place to start. In those circumstance, a door latch which needs a knack
to open, the absence of a drivers handbook and the need for team of
mechanics to tune it before every race is absolutely par for the course.
And a racing driver who complains about such things will - quite rightly
- be quickly shown the door.
But for the average driver in the street it's exactly the opposite. One
sticking door latch, one miss-start, one breakdown on the first test
drive and they've had their one bite of the cherry and ain't never
coming back for more.
Imo this is the only problem I'd like to see solved.
I started out a few weeks ago trying to point out that this list is more
for users in overalls at the pit stop than drivers in business suits on
their way to the office.
Imo a forum for user-drivers rather than user-engineers would help focus
the view from the other end of the telescope and prevent discussion of
such superficial issues from clogging the inboxes of the rocket
scientists who really need to be concentrating on getting us to Mars.
I personally would like to contribute towards the development of some
kind of drivers handbook. But if I can't get a working model going for
myself then it's hard to know where to start.
Ian
Jonathon -- Improov wrote:
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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