Training, Services, and Face-to-face Visits

We are also working on various service offerings and efforts to help the project grow and maintain sufficient financing for the operation of the project. Much of the work has been done and will continue to be done by unpaid contribution, but those who have adopted OFBiz for commercial use and those who have hired Andy and me for custom work and OFBiz additions have provided a necessary component of sustaining the project.

As the project continues we are working on ways to finance the maintenance and improvement of the project and still make it completely open and unburdened for use. So, we are announcing some services that will help people use the project and provide some financing for the project.

For instance, we will continue to provide email support for free, but we will also offer priority support services for a fee. We will be offering training classes but the training materials like all documentation we produce for OFBiz will be freely available and part of the project.

We have already completed some training outlines and they are in CVS. They will be posted to the website soon, when the site is updated for the next release.

The big question about training is: Where should we do training classes? We will be starting courses over the next few months and we will announce some locations and dates soon. We will decide on where and when to offer them based on feedback we get.

On that topic, we also want to start doing more face-to-face visits with those who are using, or thinking of using, Open For Business. This has two purposes: it helps us see what people are doing with OFBiz, it gives you a chance to ask us more questions about the project, and it gives us both a chance to talk about different ways of using the project.

Andy is in North Carolina and is available for meetings near there.

I am currently in Utah and I have been meeting with a few people here and the meetings have gone well so I would like to continue doing this. I will be leaving soon for California and can be available for meetings right now in this area of the country.

As we do training in various places we would like to arrange similar meetings at the same time and continue interacting with as many people as possible.

Looking forward to meeting all of you.

Later,
-David Jones