Skip wrote:
It is my view that with few exceptions, the back office Ofbiz applications, are not designed for the real people to use. As some examples, go to your friendly neighborhood corporate office and ask the A/R, A/P or manager type person the meaning of these terms: Logical Id, Facility Type ID, Empl Position Type Id, Manual Auth Is Capture, Order Enum Id, To Geo, Validate G C Fin Acct, Contact Mech, Reason Enum, etc. etc.
If that person can correctly identify the purpose of any of them (and they have not used Ofbiz before), I would be very surprised. I would actually be surprised if you know all of them off the top of your head. These are a few of the ones I copied and pasted from various places in the Ofbiz back office applicatons. There are hundreds more. To use these applications OOTB, the person using it has to be educated on the meaning of what is mostly jargon. Remember too that some of these applications are rarely used, but critical when needed. That is why I say that it is probably uneconomical to train people to use Ofbiz OOTB. It is, I think, more economical to rewrite the UI using terms understood by the people using them.
Actually, given those names along with a context most people familiar with business processes and terms could at least come up with a pretty close guess as to what those means. All of this is made up stuff, there is nothing natural for humans, so it depends 100% on prior experience. Most users of any system will need some sort of training or documentation to help them through what they need to do, especially the first few times. That can certainly be reduced by user interfaces tailored to the needs of a certain role or task (which EXACTLY why OFBiz is licensed using something very friendly to derivative works), but even then generally not eliminated.
By the way, I do not mean to be derogatory here. I have evaluated lots of ERP applications for the folks I represent, both opensource and commercial. Ofbiz is the best of them all (or will be when I am done) and I am committed to providing them a world-class set of applications based on it.
That's a nice thing to say, I hope that for you, like many others before you, it will turn out to remain that way throughout your experience. The real focus of most of the effort so far in the project, as many have noted, is to provide good tools and lower level artifacts that can be easily customized to more quickly get to the application you need, and obviously it is best suited to the staggeringly complex applications so many of us are asked frequently to put together. Hopefully as the project grows we'll have more user interfaces tailored to a specific role or task. There are quite a few now, but that is an open world with nearly infinite possibilities...
What I am trying to do is get those involved in the development to think about the people who actually use the product in the end, the A/R-A/P clerks, the shipping and recieving people, the CPAs, the purchasing agents, the sales folks, and all the rest.
You've probably already noticed this, but just to make it clear for conversation sake: the specific roles and requirements for the client you are working with are probably similar to, but different in key ways, than what is needed for other industries and even other companies in the same industry. The intent of OFBiz is to make it applicable across a wide set of such, which is why the OOTB applications tend to include lots of stuff that ANY particular user (or better said: role or task) wouldn't need, but some other user would. -David
