Le 03/09/2014 09:33, Chloé Desoutter a écrit :
Hello,
We're a F/OSS company looking at what exists in the ERP sector. We have
internal needs and we have business development needs.
We have been using OpenERP for a while but are quite dissatisfied with several
points :
- Its database schemas are just unreadable w/o the app, so we are bound to using its web services only and cannot migrate data without writing magic
glue code.
- They have a policy of nagging for registration that displeases us a lot : end
users don't need to see a Piracy-warning-like message on F/OSS.
- It's so tightly bound to the database that it's not possible to migrate it to
another way of storing the data.
- It's not "real Open Source" as it is an Affero GPL product. This means that
whatever we do will eventually be owned by the central company.
OFBiz is at the opposite of these points : its DB schemas are based on standards, it doesn't have a central authority that wants your money, it's
licensed under a permissive license, and it can already manage to live in lots of database.
Your are the first to ask this question, and I'm not surprised by your totally
right analysis.
I'm more surprised that your are the first reporting this after so long years.
This shows that we have still a long road promoting OFBiz.
But we need to know who uses OFbiz and how? Who can we make new business with?
Who already makes business with it? Is there room for new experts?
A lot of people and companies are earning a living with OFBiz and there are
still a lot of opportunities.
OFBiz is used by small as international companies in diverse domains. One of the 1st then not so big company was Atlassian, which still uses the OFBiz
Entity Engine in Jira. Jira made them what they are now.
The more the size of community increases the more places for OFBiz new experts
increase.
We are still small and there are plenty of places to take out there, long life
to OFBiz!
The documentation is scarce and except if we buy books online (written for
outdated versions) it will be a guessing game to know what it is.
There is only one "outdated" book (the beginner's tutorla), and as explained at
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBADMIN/OFBiz+Related+Books it's still relevant because for most parts the architecture did not change
since. Of course, underneath few things changed, but you can see this book as an interface to learn how to use OFBiz, even if the implementation has
sometimes changed. We care for our users, not only but also because we are among those users...
Where can we get the fresh news and status of the project?
We maintained this page until December 2013
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBIZ/Main+New+Features
It's now automated with Jira at explained in the Deprecated warning at the top
of this page
Jacques
Yours sincerely
