[OPEN-ILS-DEV] SPAM: SPAM: acq/ser update

[arhyno at uwindsor.ca]

Hi folks,

I have been getting so many enquires on this that I am long overdue to 
give an update. Brad and his crew of superheros are preparing a server for 
wider scrutiny in addition to the million other tasks they are carrying 
out right now, and we have tagged a few folks to help out on the 
application specs and development. It has become clear that some 
organizations are on a very aggressive timeline, even more so than my 
institution because of the Sirsi/Dynix developments, and we are trying to 
ramp up activity on acq/ser as a result. I have been a bottleneck in the 
process, there are commitments we simply must complete before devoting 
extended time to this effort, and I had originally envisaged a schedule 
that would have seen an ILS change for us in the Fall of 2008. We are now 
trying to leapfrog this effort to make most of this happen by the end of 
the summer. But in order to bring some sort of coherence to my inbox, here 
is a quick FAQ on the project:

1) What is the partnership between the University of Windsor and 
Evergreen?

Brad has described this well here: 

http://open-ils.org/blog/?p=80

We are formally committed to work on an Acquisitions layer for Evergreen 
as part of the process of shifting away from our current ILS. This has not 
meant the hiring of any additional staff directly at this point, and our 
approach has been to try to free up existing resources as much as 
possible. This is happening but the pace and consistency should be at a 
stronger level this summer as we finally close out some major projects 
that have been keeping us busy.

2) Why OFBiz for a base, and why not some other ERP system, such as 
Compiere, etc... 

OFBiz is a TLP or Top Level Project at Apache, the gold standard for Open 
Source, is seven years old, and has been deployed in production by many 
profits and non-profits. That's not to say there are not parts of OFBiz I 
dislike, but it is mature and it works. There are other solid applications 
that would be contenders here, like SQL-Ledger ERP and Compiere. In fact, 
SQL-Ledger would be far closer to Evergreen's current code base, but part 
of the brilliance of Evergreen's design is to use a wire protocol that 
allows a mix of technologies, including Perl and Java, and OFBiz is much 
more like an application framework than a specific coding platform anyway.

3) But isn't anything related to Java inherently evil?

One of my children has started to work in Java and has voiced this 
opinion, but the value of Java has very little to do with it as a 
language, and a whole lot more to do with the richness of its APIs. Only 
the most intricate development in OFBiz requires any interaction with Java 
code directly, and something like beanshell would probably be a better 
point of debate from an OFBiz point of view. I gave up programming 
affiliations somewhere around the time that I no longer had to stand in 
line with punchcards, but I note that Lucene and Solr are Java 
technologies, and it's hard to imagine anyone working in the discovery 
layer for library content, especially full text objects, without having 
Lucene and Solr as part of the toolkit, so Java seems to be part of the 
library technology landscape for a while at least.

4) What would speed up the availability of Acq/Ser?

We are bringing some more people into this project, you would recognize 
their names :-) That will be a big help. There's a proposal floating 
around right now for an intense, hackfest type of activity, centered 
around acq/ser, which may take place in a few weeks. Anyone who is 
familiar with the "project rabbithole" events associated with projects 
like jboss will recognize the value of this kind of interaction. I am 
still lining up some sponsor funding for this, it would be great to have 
some help with that.

I have received some really valuable documentation of specific workflows 
from people on this list. It would be really helpful to see more of these. 
When we have the demo machine available, feedback on what's there will be 
of immense value as well.

5) Where is the list of what's available in Acq/Ser, what will be added, 
schedules, etc...?

We definitely need to get more information out on this, and I take full 
responsibility for the lack of material on what has been done and what 
will be added. I am loath to far into detailed descriptions without more 
groundwork on serials and ERM, since the plumbing for this will have an 
impact on the rest of the system. The serials support in OFBiz definitely 
requires the most work, though, even here, many mainstream business 
processes reflect similar workflows and there is a lot of functionality 
that can be repurposed in this effort. I am appending the document that I 
have been working from but this is a very broad overview.

WoodChip: version 1 targets
Last Updated: 10 June 2007

General

* Database independent, initial layout for derby and postgres
* Switch  from HTTP (insecure) to HTTPS (secure) and back based on 
protection desired for each page
* XML Load spec for migration data

Desiderata

* Material Finding/Browsing
* Wish lists and scenario-based selection (what happens to my budget if I 
order this)
   * Purchase Order Receipt Scheduling

Order Manager

    * Order History
    * Search for existing orders
          o By Order ID or PO#
          o By Item ID
          o With Date Filter
          o UPS XML-based Integration (XPCI - supplied with OFBiz)

Party Manager

    * Party Types: Persons and Groups
    * Finding Parties
    * Party Data Maintenance
          o UserLogin & Security Data
          o Contact Mechanisms: Telecom Number, Postal Address, Email 
Address, Web Page Address, etc.
          o Payment Mechanisms: Credit Cards, Other types of Accounts
          o Party Roles
          o Party Relationships
    * Security Data Maintenance
          o Security Permissions
          o Security Groups
          o UserLogin Group Membership
          o Group Permission Association

Accounting Manager

    * General Ledger Accounts
          o View Chart of Accounts
          o Create New GL Account
          o Edit an existing GL Account
    * Billing Accounts
          o Find a Billing Account
          o View/Edit a Billing Account
    * Invoices
          o Receive/process Invoices
          o Find/View existing Invoices
    * Payments
          o Find a Payment Received
                + by Payment ID
                + by Payment Method Type
                + by Status
                + From/To Party
                + with Date Filter
          o Record a Manual Transaction

Version 2
Serials (End of Summer - based on Manufacturing Module)

   * Checkin
          o calendar hooks already in both workeffort layer and scheduler

ERM (End of Summer - based on CRM Module)

   * Contract management
   * HTTP status checker - based on Apache http toolkit
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