General Rule is you have to expend time or money and sometimes both.
Ofbiz was originally design to have a consultant do the setup for you.
In that Regard you don't need to have On-Board IT staff.
Those of us that have the know how have spend great deal of time
learning what we need, to make it work the way we want.
Ofbiz is not the typical out of Box up and run software.
However if you compare the Cost of getting the equivalent Commercial
ERP, like SAP, up and running, Ofbiz is less costly.
CallMeAndy sent the following on 10/18/2010 8:43 AM:
I am sure I read somewhere that OfBiz was a solution that would reove the
neccesity of IT staff.
That statement is a joke.
I am fortunate as a Business evaluator that I have a master's in Business
Information Technology and touched on J2EE applications during that study,
but It was a while back. I am also sure a lot of business users would
evaluate this for themselves without having to rely on IT sorting it all out
for them.
My experience on XP so far has almost already turned me away from the
product, and I have barely even scratched the surface. I want this to work
for me; on the face of it it looked like a good product using the open
source model.
But after I dont know how many hours I finally got to be able to login.
The most basic information that less-technical evaluators need seems
difficult to find.
First off:
A simple thing like the difference between JDK and SDK both specified as
requirements in different locations and "J2SE SDK" does that even exist
anymore, not obviously on the oracle site, took a while before I could
decide what was needed. I plumped for Java EE SDK in the end. That wasted
time as an aborted install due to needing JRE. Of course the OfBiz community
is not responsible for the naming confusion at Sun ( I could never be sure
that version 1.5 was actualy version 5 of Java2 - or am I still confused)
and furthered by Oracle but you need business evaluators to have as smooth a
ride with this as possible.
Ok I got Java running. Luckily I new how to use the commandline. Not that it
was made clear that that is what I should have been doing to run the ant
script.
Som searching probably 30 mins or so. Nothing
Then lets try Startofbiz.bat. Nothing appears to happen apart from the
verbose server output. No interface in which to login. Hum maybe ofbiz is in
the browser?
No nothing obvious there: ofbiz.jar double click - nothing.
Loads more googling. an hour or so.
Oh hang on its a server application so maybe localhost
http://localhost nope
http://localhost/ofbiz nope
http://127.0.0.1 nope
http://127.0.0.1/ofbiz nope
Loads more googling. an hour or so or maybe more.
Ah just remembered portaddres in the browser sometimes required.
http://localhost:8080/ofbiz/ ....hooray
oh actually nothing here of any use at all.
Next day now - loads more searching still dont know how to bloody get into
the application.
http://localhost:8080/accounting - finally I saw from a web address example
at hotwax - not even on the ofbiz site.
and so close to having thrown this out, just at the limit of my tolerance,
and now there are localisation issues.
How to set up the main company? A party! in the UK to me this would seem
oblique. Of course I realise its a generic term that covers any kind of
organisation, department, or individual but I am already up-tight and I am
wasting more time looking for another interface.
So running through setting up a company and hey I have input a company name
and the address, and already set the preference for the company profile
currency as GBP and the other demo departments inherit from company - what?
its still inheriting dollars! The accounting preferences are different from
the company currency and you cant change the default currency of the main
company, without some clunky workaround.
...more searching here we go again and getting to the end of the day - it
doesnt bode well and is costing me an arm and a leg for a product that might
not be of value to me!!
