The Apache Software Foundation Announces New Version of Leading Software Framework...

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

FOREST HILL, Md., April 20 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- 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 9.4 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.

SOURCE Apache Software Foundation

Sally Khudairi of Apache Software Foundation, +1-617-921-8656, sk@apache.org