Keith,
I think thread may have gotten a bit too technical in discussion and some
users didn't realize original intent of thread.
Do you want to start up another individual thread on mifos-users regarding
functional improvements users would like to see? I'm certain built-in or
integrated accounting, automatic fees, support for photos or file
attachments, business rules between loan and savings accounts would be some
of the requests.
I think we're overdue for a community-wide user meeting then can narrow down
some of the functional improvements community would like to see as we start
a process for identifying, proposing, and then prioritizing community driven
processes.
Ed
On Jul 1, 2011 5:13 AM, "Keith Woodlock" <keithwoodl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Binny,
>
>> Are we concentrating too much on technical improvements while not paying
>> adequate attention to new/improved features?
>
> Yes, this is the whole point of this email chain. I was asking for
> input/feedback from the users about what to put into mifos after Maya
> G. So far only george has offered some insight into what might be
> useful going forward. From a technical point of view we know what we
> need to do but theres no point in taking on that investment unless
> customers out there want further features/improvements etc
>
> regards,
> Keith.
>
> On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 5:50 AM, Binny Gopinath <binny.gopin...@gmail.com>
wrote:
>>
>> Are we concentrating too much on technical improvements while not paying
>> adequate attention to new/improved features?
>>
>> Technical improvements without any visible improvement to end-users - may
>> cause users to consider moving away from Mifos. I would like releases to
be
>> a mix of new/improved functional features + a bunch of technical
>> improvements. I have had the chance to get a glimpse into some of our
>> competition and very soon our feature set is going to be insufficient,
which
>> is heartbreaking ..
>>
>> On technical improvements:
>> - would be good to include testing/handling of larger volumes - I have
had a
>> couple of enquiries from large MFI's - one of them has 4+ million members
>> - on i18n, would be good to allow overriding of specific
internationalized
>> labels look up from config folders - so that they do not get overwritten
by
>> any upgrades. And also handle date formats consistently, especially in
>> reports.
>>
>> Thanks
>> Binny
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 10:33 AM, Van Mittal-Henkle
>> <va...@grameenfoundation.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> George,
>>>
>>> I'm catching up on some of these threads after being out for a few days
>>>
>>> > - there's a mobile revolution underway in sub-Saharan Africa; building
>>> > both the APIs/hooks for connecting into a variety of mobile systems
>>> > (from mobile money to mobile interfaces for clients and MFI staff to
>>> > exchange of info with other systems that are running mobile apps) and
>>> > also potentially getting a few sample/reference mobile apps running on
>>> > Mifos (need to vet specific pain points so we don't build something
>>> > just for the sake of building it)
>>>
>>> If Mifos provided Restful or WSDL based APIs it would open up lots of
>>> possibilities for building on Mifos for things like this. Having stable
>>> APIs for people to build on is one of the things we have been working
>>> towards for some time. A lot of KeithW's efforts in particular have
>>> been around getting internals to a state where we could start layering
>>> an API on them. As mentioned, getting specific customers with specific
>>> use cases to drive this is key.
>>>
>>> > also for you and the other engineers who have worked on MIfos: in a
>>> > community model if there's less oversight, is there under-the-covers
>>> > work that should be prioritized which will help keep Mifos stable and
>>> > scalable as it goes forward in the community?
>>>
>>> Here's where some big questions come up.
>>>
>>> One hypothesis is that there are two classes of Mifos users-- Class 1:
>>> larger MFIs who have a need for various extensions and customizations of
>>> Mifos and who can take on some expense to do that and even host their
>>> own infrastructure and Class 2: smaller MFIs who could likely manage
>>> with fewer features and less extensibility and who would benefit most
>>> from low cost hosted access to Mifos.
>>>
>>> How to most effectively meet the needs of both users is tricky.
>>>
>>> We've been challenged by the current code base being difficult and
>>> expensive to extend and maintain. We have made progress in improving
>>> the code and certain areas of it are much easier to deal with now.
>>> However, there is still a large amount of code left that needs
>>> improvement.
>>>
>>> The most cost effective way to deliver a solution that can be
>>> effectively hosted at very low cost (supporting multi-tenancy for
>>> example) at this point looks like a rewrite that would pull in reusable
>>> parts of Mifos but redo the basics from the ground up to get things like
>>> multi-tenancy, transaction management, auditing, clean i18n, layered
>>> architecture, separation of concerns and manageable tests in place. To
>>> keep the cost of doing a rewrite low, it would help for the target
>>> release to have fewer features and options than Mifos currently does.
>>>
>>> On the other hand, supporting larger existing and new MFIs and those
>>> requiring the larger feature set currently supported by Mifos would
>>> benefit from the current code base being extended and refined. The
>>> difficulty here is that the cost to continue maintaining the current
>>> code is high as is the cost to refactor and improve it.
>>>
>>> Keith and I are in agreement on the things that he already laid out
>>> here:
>>> http://mifosforge.jira.com/wiki/display/MIFOS/Technical+Roadmap+%28Post+
>>> Maya+G+and+onwards%29
>>>
>>> This is a good list of how the current code base could be moved forward.
>>>
>>>
>>> Replacing the current Struts/JSP based UI code with Spring/Freemarker is
>>> the biggest single enabler for lowering the cost of maintaining and
>>> extending Mifos. It leads to:
>>> * API creation across the application (by achieving complete separation
>>> of business logic from presentation code)
>>> * simplified transaction management
>>> * simplified i18n
>>> * improvement of layered architecture
>>> * reduction and simplification of test code
>>>
>>> --Van
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
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>>
>
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> All of the data generated in your IT infrastructure is seriously valuable.
> Why? It contains a definitive record of application performance, security
> threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes
> sense of it. IT sense. And common sense.
> http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2d-c2
> _______________________________________________
> Mifos-users mailing list
> Mifos-users@lists.sourceforge.net
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mifos-users
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All of the data generated in your IT infrastructure is seriously valuable.
Why? It contains a definitive record of application performance, security
threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes
sense of it. IT sense. And common sense.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2d-c2
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