The Apache Open For Business Project / News: Recent posts

THE APACHE SOFTWARE FOUNDATION ANNOUNCES NEW VERSION OF LEADING SOFTWARE FRAMEWORK FOR ECOMMERCE, ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING, AND CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT APPLICATIONS

Forest Hill, Maryland – 20 April 2009 – The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) – developers, stewards, and incubators of leading community-driven Open Source projects – announced the newest release of Apache Open For Business (OFBiz), a leading non-commercial enterprise software framework.... read more

The Open For Business Project has been in the Apache Incubator since early this year and the incubation process is nearly complete.

The official name of the project is now The Apache Open For Business Project, or Apache OFBiz for short (or AOFBiz for really short).

The new URL for the Apache OFBiz site is:

http://incubator.apache.org/ofbiz/

The incubation status page is here:

http://incubator.apache.org/projects/ofbiz.html ... read more

September 26, 2005 Open Source Strategies, Inc. and Undersun Consulting LLC announced today that the General Ledger application for the Open For Business open source project (www.ofbiz.org) is now in beta testing under a community funding model.

The community funding model relies on contributions from members of the Open For Business Project community to cover the cost of developing open source software. Any member of the community can make a contribution of any amount towards the
development effort. Users who contribute over a fixed amount can also start using theGeneral Ledger application immediately under a license which allows them to access and modify the source code. When contributions cover the initial development costs, the General Ledger application will be released under an open source license for all to use. With this funding model, the initial cost of open source software development can be covered either by a large number of small contributions or a few larger contributions. Larger contributors also benefit from having a completed application for a fraction of the time or cost of developing it themselves. Finally, when the development costs are recovered, the application is made available under a true open source license without use, modification, or distribution restrictions. Thus, the project benefits from a concentrated effort to create the seed of an open source application, which can then be extended through long-term community development.... read more

The new Open For Business Mailing Lists can be found at http://lists.ofbiz.org.

The Open For Business Project has moved its source repository to Subversion! You may access information on public access to this repository from http://svn.ofbiz.org

Open For Business 3.0.0 now available for download. This release includes hundreds of new features and now has nearly all functionality required for a retail fulfillment based business and many other types of businesses to operate. It is an excellent foundation for custom in-house projects and commercial derivative works, or as a basis for applications provided as a service. It includes:

- advanced e-commerce
- catalog management
- promotion & pricing management
- order management (sales & purchase)
- customer management (part of general party management)
- warehouse management
- fulfillment (auto stock moves, batched pick, pack & ship)
- accounting (invoice, payment & billing accounts)
- manufacturing management
- general work effort management (events, tasks, projects, requests, etc)
- content management (for product content, web sites, general content, blogging, forums, etc)
- and much more all in an open source package!... read more

A few weeks ago we started the move of our CVS repository and mailing lists from SourceForge to java.net. This move is now complete and seems to be running well, so we request that everyone using the old mailing lists start to use the new ones. We also now offer the latest OFBiz code from the ofbiz CVS module on the java.net CVS servers.

Regards,
-David & Andy

A number of people have been asking about more detailed documentation regarding
specific aspects of OFBiz, especially user guides for the applications and
how-tos for the framework. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be sufficient
money or time anywhere to sponsor the centralized creation and maintenance of
that sort of documentation, so alternatives have been tossed around, and the
best one seems to be setting up a Wiki site for OFBiz.... read more

This is one of those releases you always hope you never have to do, but hey bugs happen. So yes, this is a maintenance release that fixes a number of bugs. There are also a couple of new features, but not many.

-Andy & David

Open For Business release 2.1.0 includes major new application functionality and framework improvements. The presentation layer architecture has been enhanced enabling a much cleaner and easier to customize ecommerce application. There are various application improvements in ecommerce, the Catalog Manager, Accounting (invoicing and billing), Facility/Warehouse/Inventory management, and others. New features and conveniences have been added to the Workflow, Service and Entity engines and to the MiniLang simple-methods.... read more

We are excited to present an update and the final plans for the upcoming Open For Business Users Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah at the end of April, 2003.

Special thanks to Automation Groups, Inc. for organizing and sponsoring this event. Here is a note from Al Byers of AGi who has put forth the effort of organizing this conference:

=======================
The Open for Business Users Conference will be held Friday, April 25, from 9AM-5PM and Saturday, April 26, from 9AM-1PM at the Downtown Holiday Inn (999 S. Main St. SLC - 801.359.8600). The cost will be $50 covering both days and
lunch will be included for both days. Send signup requests to Al Byers (byersa@automationgroups.com). Both David E. Jones and Andy Zeneski, the founders of OFBiz, will be in attendance. Activities will include a discussion of new features, new directions and work sessions.... read more

A recent article in Internet Retailer Magazine mentions the Open For Business project as an example of an open source platform successfully used as a commercial alternative.

This is an interesting article about the many benefits of using open source business software.

See it at:

http://www.internetretailer.com/article.asp?id=8731

The schedule for OFBiz training courses and seminars has been announced and posted on the www.ofbiz.org website. Courses will be available in cities all over the United States over the next few months and with sufficient interest in other places in the world as well.

More information can be found at http://www.ofbiz.org/services.html

If you have any questions or are interested in attending, please email David Jones or Andy Zeneski.... read more

I am excited to announce the first OFBiz Users Conference in Provo, Utah hosted by Automation Groups, Inc (AGi, see www.automationgroups.com). This conference is for those who are using or thinking of using OFBiz.

The conference will run for one and a half days on Friday the 25th of April, 2003 and Saturday the 26th. There will be a munch & mingle get-together the evening before (on Thursday) to meet and mingle, and some free time on Saturday afternoon to network in smaller groups and discuss opportunities related to OFBiz and other great open source tools.... read more

In a new release from Monday, January 27, 2003 ReturnBuy Inc. tells Internet Retailer Magazine why they choose Open For Business as their e-commerce platform. CTO Greg Scharer expressed that the savings in licensing fees and the ability to easily integrate their internal applications is what sold them. Read the entire article at: http://www.internetretailer.com/dailyNews.asp?id=8499

The Open For Business Project released version 2.0.0 of
its business automation tools, components, and applications on Monday the 20th of January 2003. This is the first stable release of the project and offers a new option for organizations of all types that have asked the question of Build vs. Buy. More information about Open For Business can be found on the web site at http://www.ofbiz.org Organizations using OFBiz can shorten enterprise information project cycles by months through a well designed architecture and corresponding framework and through pre-built components and applications.... read more

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.... read more

This release includes a lot of new functionality and a number of bug fixes. There has been a lot of work on the Entity Engine, Service Engine, Workflow Engine, WebApp Framework, and new features for marketing in addition to a number of catalog, order, party and ecommerce enhancements.

For more details, see the release notes ( http://www.ofbiz.org/releasenotes.html ).

It's been a while since we did a release, so even though we are pretty close to doing a 2.0.0 release and starting a new versioning scheme (using 2.0.1, 2.4.3, and so forth), we wanted to do one last beta since there have been so many changes since 2.0 beta 2.... read more

Open For Business is an Enterprise Automation suite which includes an application framework and a set of enterprise applications. It is J2EE based and currently has a nice framework and a very complete eCommerce package with supporting back-office applications.

Framework features include Entity, Service, Workflow and Rule Engines, a Webapp Framework and an XML Mini-Language to tie pieces together. The applications include a set of administrative and development support web tools and Catalog, Order, Party and Work Effort managers in addition to the customer facing eCommerce application.... read more

Hello All,

The Open For Business Project is progressing very well. We have released Beta 1 of version 2.0, and we will be releasing another beta fairly soon, and the final 2.0 release will likely be out around the middle of next month.

We are aware of quite a few people who are using OFBiz, and some who even have OFBiz based sites deployed. The point of this email is to start the process of gathering this information for publication on our website.... read more

Here it is: Beta 1 of version 2.0! This release represents the completion of all of the major pieces of the OFBiz enterprise application framework, which has been the focus of the 2.0 release. For those who have been waiting for a stable release to get started with OFBiz, here you go. We plan to make the 2.0 Final release backward compatible with this release. Some things may be added, but configuration files and code that uses the APIs should need no changing.... read more

This is the second alpha release for version 2.0 of Open For Business. OFBiz has been refactored and cleaned up a lot for this release. We have done some profiling and speed optimizations and OFBiz is now running MUCH faster, especially in containers like Orion and Resin.

Speaking of Orion and Resin, sample deployment files and instructions are now included for Tomcat4, Jetty4, JBoss 2.4.4, Weblogic 6.1, Orion 1.5.3 and Resin 2.0.5.... read more

Version 2.0 Alpha 1 of the Open For Business Project was released on January 16, 2002. This release introduces the Service, Workflow and Rule Engines, some XML Mini-Languages, and improvements to many existing pieces like the addition of JTA support to the Entity Engine. For a good overview of these technologies and what they are useful for, check out the Overview Presentation on our website, www.ofbiz.org.... read more

We announced around the time of the 1.0 Beta 1 release that there would be a 1.0 final within the next couple of months, and then after that the 2.0 series would start which would include the services framework, the workflow engine, and the rules engine.

You may have also heard that we are working a lot on the 2.0 components mentioned above, and that is right.

Actually, we decided not to do a 1.0 final release because that would slow down the 2.0 releases.... read more

The Open For Business Project has released version 1.0 Beta 1 of its Enterprise Application Framework and eCommerce Application.

Version 1.0 of Open For Business will include the Entity Engine and Tools, the Model 2 Control Servlet, the Data Model, the Catalog Manager, and the eCommerce application. It will also include a sneak peak at the upcoming Generic Services Framework, Workflow Engine and Rules Engine.... read more