Again, we use the Asset Maintenance component OOTB here. Even though I'm an in-house IT guy and I
was the one who installed OFBiz here, it didn't have to be me doing it. Our facilities manager
(person, not program) could have downloaded a binary release, unzipped it and started using the
Asset Maintenance component on his own. No consultant or systems guru is needed. Seriously.
Many of our users are at that skill level where they could download and install software themselves.
The problem comes when someone like that tries to follow the Production Setup guidelines and is told
to modify properties files and XML files. They won't know what to do at that point.
I believe this to be a very real scenario, especially once the Accounting
component is finished.
A binary release doesn't have to come from the OFBiz site. It could come from another source, like
Opentaps. I suppose someone providing a binary release of their own could develop their own system
configuration screen as well.
-Adrian
Walter Vaughan wrote:
Jacques Le Roux wrote:
I'm not sure to see the frontier here...
Except in the edge case, I don't see how many people who are at the
level of being able to install and operate SugarCRM could do the same
thing with OFBiz. And moving it up a level, compare installing a demo
version of OFBiz with downloading and installing the Microsoft Dynamics
GP 10 demo. Or staying closer to open source, installing postBooks
(http://www.xtuple.com/postbooks).
My point is that if it's an OOTB solution as the goal or even a forked
goal of the community, then last March when the 4.0 release was created,
some effort should have gone into consistent user interfaces,
installation wizards, documentation, manuals. The communty voted with
its keyboards to instead add hundreds of new features to the trunk
instead. Given that the number of bug fixes that have gone into the 4.0
release can be measured by a human hand testifies that the community is
addicted to features. NOT THAT IT'S A BAD THING :)
Me, I've always thought it should be as easy to install OFBiz as any top
line .php application that asks a few (or as many as is needed)
questions, confirms and configures itself, and is ready to operate
within minutes, and the configurator be re-entrant to allow
configuration changes in the future and also suggest settings for
certain conditions.
--
Walter "rambling post" Vaughan
