The Apache Software Foundation Announces New Version of Leading Software Framework for eCommerce, Enterprise Resource Planning, and Customer Relationship Management Applications

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) - developers, stewards, and incubators of leading community-driven Open Source projects - announced the newest release of Apache Open For Business (OFBiz), a leading non-commercial enterprise software framework.

Overseen by a Project Management Committee (PMC) that is responsible for all code released under the Apache OFBiz name, OFBiz Release Branch 9.04 marks the first major release in nearly two years. OFBiz comprises mature eCommerce, Enterprise Resource Planning, and Customer Relationship Management functionality with a general enterprise software framework and a set of base and special purpose applications.

Today, OFBiz is one of the top enterprise software packages in the world, with hundreds of experienced service providers and thousands of live production instances.

"As an ASF Project, no single company owns and markets the software exclusively," explained David E. Jones, original OFBiz co-creator and Chair of the OFBiz PMC. "Its meritocratic, community-driven nature results in software that is designed to be flexible and applicable to a broad range of real-world business needs, while at the same time freeing users from licensing fees and lock-in from both vendors and service providers. "

Many of the Project's code contributors develop custom OFBiz solutions professionally; a key benefit to its users is that the software can be easily adapted to the needs of any organization and includes functionality applicable to real-world business. By employing well-established Open Source technologies and standards such as Java(TM), J2EE(TM), XML, and SOAP, OFBiz applications can be used as-is, although they were designed to be customized to suit the needs of each end-user organization. As such, in addition to being supported and maintained by its PMC, the OFBiz community continues to grow its number of individual committers, as well as breadth of organizations using the software.

Enterprise-grade Enhancements

New functionality includes highly configurable enterprise-grade accounting; project management, human resources, and sales force automation applications; enhanced asset management and maintenance; eCommerce enhancements to meet the demands of today's online retail environments; visual theme and configurable portal support; a Web-based point-of-sale application; business intelligence tools, and various new reports. The release also features major improvements in overall production stability, quality, and security, including protection from vulnerabilities common to Web-based software; enhancements to marketing and content management functionality; as well as support for eBay and Google Checkout(TM) payment and billing service.

Revised Versioning

Traditionally the Project released updates every 1-2 years using the sequence-based software versioning scheme (the previous branch version was 4.0); however the Project now employs a time-based version system based on the date of release, similar to the Ubuntu Linux version numbers. As such, the latest version is known as "release9.04" because it has branched from the main code base (the "trunk") in April 2009.

Additional resources for those getting started with OFBiz as well as those seeking to become more deeply involved are now available at the Project's newly-redesigned Web site at http://ofbiz.apache.org.

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)

Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than sixty-five leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server -- the world's most popular Web server software. Through The ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way", nearly 300 individual Members and 2,000 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Google, HP, Microsoft, Progress Software, SpringSource, and Yahoo! For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/.

Apache, the ASF logo, Apache OFBiz, are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. Java and J2EE are trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. Google Checkout is a trademark owned by Google Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.