Open For Business 3.0.0 is 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!

There are also many new features and tools in the framework, including enhanced content management, form & survey tools and enhancements to the Entity Engine, Service Engine, and the various other framework components. The organization of the project has also been changed to make it more componentized. Each component is a self contained set of Java classes/resources, entity & service definitions, and web applications. Third party components can now be dropped in as-is to a hot-deploy directory and automatically deployed.

For more information see the Open For Business Project (OFBiz) web site at "http://www.ofbiz.org".

Cool work!

the collection of Enterprise Java business solutions for companies will be bigger and bigger everyday:
- e-commerce: Open For Business, ...
- ERP: Compiere ERP, ...
- e-learning: OpenUSS, ...
- e-community: The Roller Weblogger, ...
- e-project/tracker: iTracker, ...
- CMS: OpenCMS, ...
- portal: Liferay, ...

Guys, maybe we should build an overall Open Source Enterprise Java solution for companies with one integrated similar user interface/presentation layer? Also with one click installation of the solution?

We can build the new generation of Open Source SAP! ;-)

Cheers,
Lofi.
http://www.openuss.org

I checked it last night, looks more mature and contains many modules that make it a viable OS business app. I rate it second to Compiere which is an almost commercial CRM/ERP.
Faisal

Yes, if some venture capital wants to put all of the architects for the various projects in one room, fed us for 9-12 months, then we'd have an even better product that'd make a quite a dent in the market.

J2ee OS lacks a good business app. check PHP's in sourceforge and u will find many CMR/ERP s that make u wish u were a PHP developer. OS J2ee SAP is an interesting idea - we already got Liferay as the most perfect base we can use.
Certainly I want to hear more about this.
Faisal

I forgot to mention this...
Putting Open Source MDA like AndroMDA on the top of all the OS products would be the killer way (simple but powerful) to handle the customization of the OS Enterprise Business solution for each customers :-)
Lofi.

Yes, if some venture capital wants to put all of the architects for the various projects in one room, fed us for 9-12 months, then we'd have an even better product that'd make a quite a dent in the market.

Hi Brian,
yup! That would be really cool ;-) This could be the second "Red Hat". At the end such an enterprise business solution is also an infrastructure for every companies:
=> comparable with IDE for developers as an infrastructure for development. Eclipse and NetBeans are example of this kind.
=> comparable with application server as an infrastructure for enterprise application. Where we are struggling at the moment with TSS: JOnAS/JBoss :-)
=> comparable with operating system as an infrastructure for hardware. Where RedHat/SuSe with Linux already gives us a mature solution.
The next step would be the enterprise business solution, where SAP stays "unbreakable" at the moment.

J2ee OS lacks a good business app. check PHP's in sourceforge and u will find many CMR/ERP s that make u wish u were a PHP developer. OS J2ee SAP is an interesting idea - we already got Liferay as the most perfect base we can use.
Certainly I want to hear more about this.

A full Enterprise Open Source Java solution would be the way to go as mostly big companies took Java for the long term strategy.
I wonder whether IBM would Open Source the SanFransisco project ;-) Because at the end they stoped the development of that product, which is a pitty actually...
Greets,
Lofi.

Yes, if some venture capital wants to put all of the architects for the various projects in one room, fed us for 9-12 months, then we'd have an even better product that'd make a quite a dent in the market.

Yes, we probably could... If we could agree on at least one thing in the first month we may have a very good chance....
For I think OFBiz and other similar projects will continue to progress as they can and become more and more useful until the open source ERP/CRM/commerce/etc world is fill of projects with maturity and feature sets similar to the commercial products. Of course, even then, I think open source projects can only go so far and certain functionality and needs for services will require commercial involvement.

Agreed. I think the financial services/ERP software arena has a lot of potential there for FOSS implementations, due to the high modularity of open source projects and the ease of (even reliance on) integration. It makes it easy to custom build specific solutions, which is a necessity in financial and business environments, where it is rarely a 'one size fits all' solution.

You read my mind. I've been trying to figure out how to piece these all together. Next big task - how to market it.

In addition to your list toss in OpenIM (openim.dev.java.net) and Glow (glow.dev.java.net).

Having spent about 9 months impl and working on 168 spec ERP I am really interested in Brian's suggestion of open SAP. Yes SAP is unbreakable. Still u can create a dif portal and most of all SAP is for big companies which can afford at least one million £ to use it - which means u still have the rest of the market. For the last few days I ve been checking most books written on SAP-
SAP is a monster of business application and It is a wishful thinking to dare emulate the German machine. May be Plumtree can challenge them in the near furture with their new J2ee 168 compliant Portal.
Faisal

Portal is just an integrated view of all the business processes. The point is that SAP has already supported a lot of business processes, which contain a lot of domain knowledge. Just check the Interface Repository of SAP Components:
http://ifr.sap.com/catalog/

Check one example "Customer" component:
http://ifr.sap.com/catalog/query.asp?namespace=urn:sap-com:ifr:FI:46C&type=bobj&name=Customer

Is therefore the question, whether Open Source professionals can also have this domain knowledge. I agree that it will be very difficult to do this without a good collaboration with business companies.

So, portal itself does not play any big role as it's only the "view". What important is the "business processes" which are implemented and can be extended.

Lofi.

Faisal has a valid point here ,but lets keep in mind that those solution might need more time to integrate tha one year since we are talking about a huge itegration/synchronization effort that will take place al the way.

thanks for the links Lofi,
a Portal - as specified in 168 spe - simplfy the task of dif business's integration. How to implements the rest of technologies is up to the developer. Most of the SAP's components,i think, can be recoded in J2ee apart from the louzzzy J2ee rendering- which was and still a problem for me .Swing is a dumb slow component (used in Compiere!). We can use Flash with remote invocation but it will open many security holes not to mention the claustorphobic Flash IDE. That's why I've to stick to standard css and HTML .
SAP was initially started by five IBM employees in 1972. to start a project like an integrated buziness application we need Business gurus more than bright coders .
Faisal

Has anyone tried to run OFBiz? I just downloaded it, tried running it using the supplied startofbiz script just like the docs say and it bombed out on me, bunch of exceptions thrown.. oh well maybe I should just wait till its fixed in a new release.

ok ok so it turns out it didnt like to be run from a directory path where spaces were present, now its working

I am trying to download the product, it appears that the link is broken. Has anybody been able to download it.

Vimal