Comments on: OFBiz – Creating New Customer

By: Christian Geisert

Christian Geisert — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:16:32 +0000

Ok, then we agree on that OFBiz has strong B2C features

By: osserpguru

osserpguru — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 22:02:15 +0000

Hi Christian,
The ‘B2C feeling’ I got was not only from the Party creation process but also the ‘goodies’ the OFBiz team decided to implement (e.g. eBay and Google Base) might be seen as targeted towards people trading with other people online for a living (which is a huge market).
Obviously, OFBiz can be used by B2B types of businesses just as well.

By: Christian Geisert

Christian Geisert — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 00:48:47 +0000

Yes, the very first impression could be that OFBiz has a B2C orientation
but it has the flexible concept of a Party which is be either a Person or a Group (= Company, Authority, internal department etc).
So to create a “B2B customer” just use “Create New Party Group” and add the customer role to this party.
Of course it would be better if there was “Create Customer (Person)” and a “Create Customer (Group)” entry on the “Create” screen of the PartyManager…

By: osserpguru

osserpguru — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 14:44:36 +0000

Hi Eren,
I agree that Openbravo’s UI is better looking than that of OFBiz. OFBiz is a strong ERP service platform – providing a functionality layer through services. That service framework is being used by other projects (Neogia, Opentaps) that can leverage the strength of the framework while improving the user experience.
OFBiz plans to improve its UI in the next releases – it was on their road map for Jan. and Feb. 2008. I will look into OFBiz’s next releases and share my experience with the new UI.

By: Eren

Eren — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 13:07:20 +0000

I wonder how much work it would be to build a real GUI upon that server, cause that is one ugly interface I’m afraid.
There seem to be a lot of functionality but it’s not nice to look at, as openbravo for example.