New Features Roadmap - Living Document
The long term goal of the OFBiz project is to build a complete, features set rich, universal and configurable "enterprise automation software" (ERP, CRM, CMMS, MRP etc.).
OFBiz is one of the few applications of this type developed by a community, rather than one corporation.
Even if the final long term goal is clear and well-defined ("building a universal enterprise automation software"), the short and medium term tasks to accomplish it are not.
The following is a proposal for the definition of a list of short and medium term tasks list: your input, suggestions and help is welcome. Please add your comment at the bottom of the page.
Legenda:
- "People interested": the people that think that the feature should be considered a priority for the project (in the short term)
- "People willing to help": persons that are in the position to help with the development of the task; if possible specify an approximately number of hours per week or month to give an idea of the total resources available for each task
Implement Human Resource Application
Enhance employee profile management, Add support for employee loyalty program, continues training management, cost to company management, salary statement report, implement security so employee can manage their account.
See the project's specific page here
People interested: Anil Patel
People willing to help: Anil Patel
Implement Recruitment application
Add a special purpose application for managing recruitment in a company.
See the project specific page OFBIZ:Recruitment applicationhere
People interested: Anil Patel
People willing to help: Anil Patel
Implement Asset management application
Add a special purpose application for managing assets in a company.
See the project specific page here
People interested: Anil Patel
People willing to help: Anil Patel
Implement Project Management Application
Implement project management application (designed for service companies like the most common ones who use ofbiz: lots of clients and projects and a steady stream of tasks to manage across multiple roles and teams); this is a specialpurpose app built (mostly) on the WorkEffort component
This component is nor pretty much finished. Just the connection to invoicing needs to be added
See the project's specific page here.
People interested: David Jones, Hans Bakker, Anil Patel
People willing to help: Hans Bakker, Anil Patel
Complete the implementation of the Accounting component
Finish implementation of the OFBiz accounting component, both the auto-posting to GL services and a nice complete set of reports (the 4 standard accounting 101 type reports plus a complete set of financial metrics)
See the project's specific page here.
People interested: David Jones, Jacopo Cappellato, Skip Dever, Scott Gray, Jim Barrows, Anil Patel
People willing to help: Jacopo Cappellato, Skip Dever, Scott Gray, Jim Barrows, Anil Patel
Implement Automated Tests for the most common processes
Implement a set of service-level test cases that go through the most common high-level processes in the system, like the ones documented in the role oriented documentation on docs.ofbiz.org; these will help have some sort of regression tests that are widely applicable, even if UIs are customized, and should cover many service-level customizations with little or no test case changes too
People interested: David Jones, Jacopo Cappellato, Anil Patel
People willing to help: Anil Patel
Continue the development of the integrated component for Business Intelligence
Continue the work started in the specialpurpose "Business Intellicence" component: Implement new dimensions (Ship-To-Customer, Warehouse, Promotion, Store etc...) and data migration services; implement new facts and starschemas; improve the reporting tools (possibly including an external tool for dimensional reports).
People interested: Jacopo Cappellato
People willing to help: Jacopo Cappellato (4 hours per week)
Complete the support for VAT (Value-Added-Tax)
See the project's specific page here.
People interested: Jacques Le Roux, Jacopo Cappellato, Marco Risaliti
People willing to help: Marco Risaliti, Jacques Le Roux, Hans Bakker
Add support for online contextual help
People interested: Skip Dever
People willing to help: Skip Dever
Screen and Form widget enhancements
See the project specific page here
People interested: Anil Patel
People willing to help: Anil Patel
Improve the Content Management Component
have a content management system which is comparable, in terms of features, to the more popular open source content management applications
People interested: Si Chen, Al Byers
People willing to help: Al Byers (5 hours per week)
Ecommerce component enhancements
See the project specific page here
People interested: Si Chen, Anil Patel
People willing to help: Anil Patel
Improve usability of the Catalog manager
People interested: Si Chen
People willing to help:
Complete the refactoring of Permissions control
People interested: Jacopo Cappellato
People willing to help: Jacopo Cappellato (2 hours per week)
Complete the migration of older bsh/ftl files to widgets
People interested: Jacopo Cappellato
People willing to help: Jacopo Cappellato (2 hours per week)
Enhance the integration with eBay DONE
Isolate the code into a new specialpurpose component. Complete the support for the creation of eBay auctions from OFBiz; improve the synchronization between OFBiz and eBay: order/shipment status changes, in/out communications, etc...
People interested: Marco Risaliti
People willing to help: Marco Risaliti
Enhance the integration with Google Product DONE
Isolate the code into a new specialpurpose component. Add more features and options to the product export.
People interested: Marco Risaliti
People willing to help: Marco Risaliti
Integrate Screen Widget and Form Widget with Dojo.
People interested: Mike Wong
People willing to help: Mike Wong
Non Backward Compatible Changes
Use Apache Commons EL instead of the Flexible String Expander
For syntax reference see:
http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/syntax/2.0/syntaxref207.html
Based on early research of the syntax it looks like most of our current Flexible String Expander usage would work with EL. The "${}", "." and "[]" syntax elements all appear to be supported.
We would also get new features like arithmetic expressions and so on.
Change the Entity Engine to be user aware for security, logging
This would be a change to require that a userLogin be passed to all Entity Engine calls. The Entity Engine could then check permissions to see if the user can modify or view that entity, or that record. The Entity Engine could also auto-populate fields like created by and updated by.
There are big downsides to this in that it is a real pain to ALWAYS have to know which user is doing stuff, and lots of our services don't know who the user is or use the "system" user to get around security constraints. The same thing would have to happen if we did this for the EE. This would also require major API refactoring, which we would probably want to precede with a big reduction in API size, as has been started but isn't yet finished.