On Mar 31, 2009, at 2:05 AM, [email protected] wrote:
Hi colleagues,
I am writing to the list to request information concerning OFBiz. I am
doing a eCommerce Software comparative between the main commercial and
open source products.
I have achieved to find information about client segmentation (use of
groups), campaign managment (through Marketing Manager and promotions),
stocks management (Facility Manager), product catalog (Product Manager),
order management (using Order Manager application), content management
(through Content Manager)...
However, there are other features I have not been able to document. I
would be very grateful if you could send me details about the following
features:
- Reports & analytics capabilities
OFBiz currently has a few dozens pre-written reports OOTB, and more can be
added using the OFBiz tools, or an external reporting
tool (which is still very common, ie companies that use something like
Crystal Reports or Business Objects will use that with
their OFBiz applications). OFBiz has tools in the framework to facilitate
building of user interfaces, and these same tools are
used for building reports. This provides a high level of efficiency, and
allows developers to use the same tools they are used
to... and in some cases scripts and other things can even be reused in reports.
OFBiz also includes some BI infrastructure to support defining and populating
star schemas, which can then be used for ad-hoc or
pre- written reports. A limited star schema exists, and work is going on to
extend it.
- Integration and Interoperability (SOA Architecture, Web Services offered)
The OFBiz logic layer is itself a Service-Oriented tool, and all primary logic
in OFBiz is implemented as services. Many of
these services can be exposed externally as web services automatically, and
the more complex ones can be exposed as web services
(or call web services) through web services code that maps to them.
- Usability (for final customers, and administrators)
Usability is very subjective, but I'll try to answer in a helpful way.
OFBiz is often customized for larger organizations, and in those cases the
best usability is achieved by analyzing processes and
then building user interfaces to directly support those processes. This
results in something specific to end-user requirements
and is far better than any OOTB user interface that even the best designers
could create without specific requirements.
That is the main design goal behind OFBiz: easy customization since the only
way to get a really good UI is to do so based on
very specific requirements... and those requirements tend to change
dramatically between organizations, in many cases even
organizations in the same industry.
The OOTB user interfaces are primarily meant for easy reuse in custom user
interfaces, so they mostly avoid automating any
specific process and are instead meant to fit into any process desired.
However, using the OOTB interfaces is pretty common and
is usually best done by documenting where and how to do common tasks according
to the processes of the organization. In other
words, instead of creating a custom UI when you are on a tighter budget you
can simply document how to use the OOTB interfaces,
and while not usually excellent this way it is quite adequate for smaller
organizations and gives them more functionality and
ability to automate things than they would have in most software, allowing
them to avoid large numbers of spreadsheets and
such. Overall this results in tools to keep track and automate organizational
information that are far more efficient and usable
that a hodge-podge of various systems.
- Personalization potential
Personalization is an extremely general term, broadly meaning behavior or data
that changes according to the user. There are
hundreds of features in OFBiz ecommerce and the OFBiz back-end (manager) apps
that would fit this description.
Please feel free to send over more details and I (or others) will be happy to
comment on them.
- Multidevice sites available?
It is pretty easy to build sites targeted at different devices, and there are some
available OOTB. If by "device" you mean a
specific UI then the hhfacility component is a good example. If by "device"
you mean specific hardware control (like cash
drawers and CC scanners), then the pos component (point-of-sale) has some good
stuff.
- Accessibility considered?
In ecommerce the templates are often changed so much that accessibility ends
up more in the hands of the designers and
developers who customize the system (so make sure you have a good service
provider!). The OOTB ecommerce templates do a pretty
good job of this by using styled text instead of images, alt-text on images,
and so on.
For the OOTB back-end functionality, accessibility is considered, and to be
maintained it must be considered in customizations.
These are primarily web-based applications and to improve accessibility are
very text-heavy, etc.
Thank you for your help in advance.
No problem, best wishes in finding a solution that meets your needs.
-David
