I like to take a little credit for OFBiz. The project had its beginnings in a company that I founded a couple of years ago. We really had no idea about the direction we wanted to go until we hired David Jones as our chief software architect. He took care of us then and he continues to take care of us now. Unfortunately, our little startup had the same problem as many others - it didn't last. We have all moved on to other things.

One thing remains constant however - we are all using OFBiz in our new pursuits.

David and his team have taken those snippets of code and built a sophisticated project that can run just about any business. I am amazed at what OFBiz can do now and what its promise for the future is.

My company, Partner Homes, builds houses with the direct involvement of our customer in a homebuilding role. Many of our clients have no experience in building homes - we're training them the whole way. We use OFBiz to tie our projects together with sophisticated task management designed for the amateur homebuilder (built on the WorkEffort module). In fact, our entire organization, from top to bottom, is run on OFBiz.

I wouldn't have it any other way.

We at eInnovation would be delighted to be a reference for Open For Business.

We have one customer live and in production with an ecommerce site since November, as you probably already know. We have several more in the pipeline, and hopefully at least one will be referenceable by the end of June. We are putting a lot of effort in trying to market Open For Business, particularly from an eCommerce perspective. Check out our website for more details. It seems like everyone we demo it for and talk to is very positive about it, and that there is a real opportunity here.

We�first started using OFBiz�for a music�retail and�wholesale site�combined�and�was so impressed with�it that we decided to build a hosting and service company based around the OFBiz platform. It's ease of customizations, development and design were just some of the key factors that lead us to�working with�OFBiz. The ability to offer our�accounts a feature rich eBusiness suite out of the box�is making us look like heroes to our small and mid size business customers.

Most of our�accounts�had the need and desire for sophisticated eBusiness applications, but just could not justify the cost of other business suites.�They were very receptive to the OFBiz value and were excited to have eBusiness tools to offer their customers and sales staff.

We highly recommend web developers and web designers that have cost�conscience customers to�develop OFBiz sites. The future looks very exciting.

I have noticed that the deployed shopping cart has needed minimal upkeep from us.

It has been argued that OFBiz is "too much framework for what we need", but one of the greatest benefits that I have seen is that when multiple modules are using the same framework and data model, a common vocabulary develops. I can go and ask about a module I have no experience with, and as soon as they start talking about "work efforts" and "contact methods", I immediately understand 90% of what they are doing. They don't have to spend time developing/explaining their data schemas. I believe that it has saved us time already, and that it will save us more time as projects mature and new projects deploy.

One of our key marketing points is our ability to quickly "brand" a product with a new customers look and feel and then deploy it fairly quickly. The OFBiz framework has much of this ability already built in.

We could have developed the things that OFBiz offers, but if a tool exists, why build the tool from scratch? We have been able to concentrate on new features rather than concentrate on whether or not the controller we just built is working correctly.

I (we) are currently using at least the Entity Engine portion of ofbiz in a production application. I have planned to evaluate/include other portions of the project as soon as I have the time to do so. My company, Vision Information Services, is in the supply chain management, Vendor managed Inventory, and Retail systems management. Unfortunately, all of our current web sites that utilize ofbiz are not public. The public site is not written in Java and is very old (not too exciting). If anyone is looking for supply chain/retail solutions though, feel free to contact us! Our customers range from large home entertainment suppliers to large retailers.

We really appreciate everything that you've put into the ofbiz package, and hopefully as we get more familiar we will be able to make some valuable contributions to the project.