The Open For Business Project - Features Coming Soon

Table of Contents

• Inroduction
• Warehousing & eCommerce - Notes as of 16 April 2003
• Content Management - Notes as of 16 April 2003

Inroduction

The purpose of this document is to help keep users of OFBiz informed about the near term directions that are planned for the project. In some cases we may mention planned timelines for specific pieces of functionality. In general the presense of a feature or idea in this document does not guarantee that it will be implemented, and the exclusion of a feature or idea from this document does not mean that it will not be implemented.

There are many factors that are taken into consideration when deciding what will be implemented next in Open For Business. The strongest factor that decides what will be implemented and when is sponsorship for a specific feature. If we have a client that is willing to pay for certain functionality and who doesn't mind it becoming part of the open source project it will most likely happen. While major components are rarely started this way, most of the features in OFBiz are the result of user sponsorship.

The next strongest factor is contributions and issues from the community. As a core team of moderators we try to reasonably evaluate all contributions and incorporate the ones that truly enhance the project. Some contributions require heavy modification and sometimes bug fixes before we can include them in the project. In general it takes time to evaluate and incorporate contributions, so we appreciate your patience with this and we thank you for your willingness to contribute to OFBiz. We also try to resolve issues that are brought up by the community as quickly as possible. While some issues fall outside the scope of the project or are really feature requests that may take a great deal of time to implement, most issues brought up are resolved quickly.. We have received hundreds of contributions and issues from the community and they have resulted in countless improvements to the project.

The third strongest factor is functionality that the core team is interested in developing. As we have free time we do what we can to improve the architecture and tools that are used in the project, and we expand the applications to try to fill in major gaps. In some cases this has been the strongest factor given that it is how OFBiz and most of the major modules in the project got started and it is how major new modules and components are generally introduced.

The fourth factor that influences our decision of what to implement next is feature requests from users or even non-users of the project. While many of these requests are elevated because of higher priority factors, these requests often get very little attention. Of course, if a feature request comes in for something that we already think is important it will increase the chance of that getting done in the near future. While we do want to try to help members of the community, we have limited design and development resources so we have to be somewhat careful about where we use them.

Warehousing & eCommerce - Notes as of 16 April 2003

Most of this functionality is sponsored by clients, so you can expect to see it implemented within the next couple of months. The high level goal of this functionality is to make it possible to run a retail merchandise business doing everything but accounting with OFBiz. In addition to the current catalog, order and party infrastructure the major pieces needed are related to warehouse management, purchase orders, incoming delivery management, shipping of merchandise, back ordered merchandise, and returns & refunds.

• Shipping
  • Generate pick-lists for groups of orders, sorted by facility location
  • Shipping label and manifest printing
  • Shipment creation and tracking
• Back Orders: includes customer notification, delivery estimates, partial CC settlements, CC refunds, etc
• Returns & Refunds: based on order items, track reasons, put refunds on CC, billing account, mail a check, store credit, etc.
• Purchase Orders
  • Manual entry of purchase orders
  • Assisted creation of purchase orders based on products needed for specific facilities
  • Schedule and manage receipt of purchase orders
  • PO based receiving
  • PO invoicing and payables

Content Management - Notes as of 16 April 2003

The Content Management portion of OFBiz is one of the big next things coming. The generic content structures are suitable for both content and knowledge management and for content used in many different ways. Some uses include public/private/internet/intranet published materials, dynamic or aggregated content similar to concepts in software such as wiki, blogs, forums/threaded discussions, and combinations of these. In addition there will be facilities for template controlled content such as legal forms, surveys, etc.

Please note that there are many different ideas about what content management should include, and this information will change as time goes on and ideas are better nailed down.

• Basic Content application screens for creating/updating content, data resources, meta data, content structure, etc.
• Use slightly modified WYSISWIG editors from WSPublisher for editing of HTML, XML, plain text and other content
• Tools to mount content structures as webapp resources (just the top-level content piece will be mounted and a tree browser and main content view area will be used to allow the user to browse the content)
• Add categorization and security features so that sets of content can be administered and view by limited groups of users.
• Add versioning to the data resource entities so that previous revisions can be maintained (planning on using a simple mechanism when revision control is desired and a certain resource is updated the old data will be put into another data resource and the original will be updated with the new data and will point to the now old data; ie clone resource, give new id, set id for new resource as the previous version on the current resource, update the data of the current resource; that way all content refering to a resource will get the new content, but it will still be possible to roll-back to previous versions; the other options would be construct a new content structure that will be published when finished so that the current stuff remains untouched until all of the new stuff is in place)
• Incorporate Lucene for text searching of content
• Incorporate FreeMarker/XSLT/Velocity to allow for scripting in content text, makes it more flexible like JSPs for dynamic content when needed
• Allow for transformation of content based on FreeMarker scripts or XSLT stylesheets
• Add some utility classes that will be put in the FreeMarker/Velocity context for content templates that will allow for calling services, including other content, refering to external resources such as images, javascript files, CSS files, etc.
• Custom set of pages for public and private forums. These are ad-hoc administered (with optional permissions) and (with optional permissions) browsed content organized in threads or topics. The content entities will probably work fine for these and it will allow them to use existing features such as searching and templating.
• Add workflow managed content creation features so that when content is created or updated a workflow can be started to manage editing, approval, publishing, etc.
• Create content constrained by templates, or more specifically document definitions like DTDs or XML Schemas. The document definition will be a piece of content and may have a workflow associated with it that is automatically started when content based on that doc type is created/updated/etc.
• Associate parties with content for administrative purposes or for things like keeping track of who has read and who must read specific content