We are always thinking about the future and how we can be the operational platform for a microfinance institution of any size to deliver financial services to the poor. Part of that long-term vision is achieving an architecture that is lightweight and multi-tenant so MFIs can scale but also modular and extensible enough that development can scale. John and Keith Woodlock have been focusing the last several months on working towards the next generation Mifos platform on a project called Mifos X. This is a long term development initiative that will happen in parallel to ongoing improvements to the current Mifos codebase. They'll be sharing a demo site and more detailed updates on the project's first phase of individual lending coverage. To formally introduce Mifos X to the community, we sat down with John and Keith Woodlock, our community architecture leads, for an interview on the COSM blog.

Read our interview exploring Mifos X with John and Keith Woodlock on the COSM blog. 

2012 is going to be a busy year for the Mifos community. The product management team recently finished up our 2012 product roadmap, bringing together all of your user feedback and feature requests into a plan to guide us for the upcoming year. SolDevelo will continue leading development, focusing on ushering in the contributions of community members and Mifos Specialists to extend Mifos to further meet the needs of MFIs.  The first major release is being targeted for end of May and has been code-named Vinolia I.  Vinolia is one of the rural women from Ghana being empowered by access to financial services and entrepreneurial training from Lumana in Atorkor, Ghana.

Visit the Community for Open Source Microfinance blog to read the full announcement. 

We announced Margaret H to you last week and it's now ready for download and use in production. We're excited about this release - not only is it the first major release led independently by SolDevelo and the community, it's packed with new features inside and outside the product. It is the teamwork of our community that produces powerful software that is helping Mifos users like Nuru serve more women like Margaret Matinde. 

We've been hearing for a while now about some must-have features and we are delivering those to you in this release and upcoming versions of the product  Margaret H includes automated late penalties, functional enhancements to GLIM, a plug-in tool for importing clients via spreadsheet, greater ease in adjusting previous transactions, and better control over end of period processing.

Following the transition of Mifos from the Grameen Foundation, we’re pleased to announce the first major release of Mifos fully supported by community members. This release will be code-named Margaret H in recognition of Margaret Matinde, one of the many women that Nuru Kenya has been empowering to rise up from extreme poverty. The community should be proud of this release - a product of your combined collaborative efforts.  Shipping in mid-March, it shall include much-needed functionality like automated penalties and exciting new capabilities like user-specific languages and a mobile-optimized interface.

Head over to the Community for Open Source Microfinance blog to read the full announcement. 

SolDevelo released Mifos 2.2.3 on January 4, 2012.  This is the last maintenance release before on the Marie G branch before Release H. It contains more than 67 resolved tickets including numerous fixes to the user interface, various fixes to improve stability of embedded BIRT reports, and the completion of APIs to apply transactions to Mifos.  You can see these new APIs in action in version 1.2 of the Mifos Android Client which SolDevelo launched on December 23.

The JIRA release notes contain a full list of all the tickets resolved in Mifos 2.2.3.

SolDevelo released Mifos 2.2.2 on November 30, 2011. This release contains more than 20 bug fixes, a new German translation, support for adding question groups to the close savings/loan account workflow, and completion of the first set of APIs for Mifos.

SolDevelo's inclusion of these additional APIs completes the REST API Module for all read/view functionality. This means that you can now build an external client/app/module that calls and reads anything from Mifos (i.e. viewing clients, groups, centers, accounts, repayment schedules).  SolDevelo used these APIs as the foundation for the first version of their Mifos Android Client which is available for download in the Android Market. Conflux Technologies and Udai Gupta are also using these APIs as they proceed on their offline client which is being developed as a Chrome Browser Extension. 

The community continues to respond to the need of its users as the questions group feature was requested by Grameen Koota to ease their process of upgrading to the latest Mifos codebase.  

Grameen Foundation is pleased to announce the release of Mifos 2.2.1 which has been fully developed and supported by the SolDevelo team, Udai Gupta, and other members of the community. Major enhancements include the first API module in Mifos, the ability to attach client photos, the flexibility to edit client date of birth and center, a new Telugu translation, and numerous bug fixes. Beyond the new functionality and the API module that's been launched, what's most important is this is the first Mifos release that's been purely supported and developed by the community independent of Grameen Foundation.

We are thrilled by the community support for this release.  This is a significant release functionally and architecturally and marks a major step in the transition of Mifos from Grameen Foundation to the community.

Rather than simply list off features let's look at what this release means for the community.

Moving Forward

Back in June when Grameen Foundation announced the Mifos transition, Mifos 2.2 was issued as a release candidate and put out there in the community for anyone to use.  SolDevelo rose up to the calling and took leadership over maintaining the current branch of Mifos - they've completed a full release cycle on Mifos, fixing nearly two dozen bugs, and building out a variety of functional and architectural enhancements. 

This past week, we released the latest hotfix, Mifos 2.1.6. This hotfix release includes the following fixes: 

• Stack trace appears is no longer appearing after submitting Question Groups with response which has more than 200 characters
• Client details page are no longer loading too slowly for some MFIs

Click here to download and view documentation. A full list of the of issues fixed can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/427kfya  and in the release notes: http://tinyurl.com/43sga7p

Please note the upgrade instructions as well when upgrading to this release.

SolDevelo to Extend Mifos 2.2

SolDevelo, highlighted in this recent newslog post, also announced via the mailing list that they will be supporting and extending the Mifos 2.2 branch. They will be moving Mifos 2.2 from a release candidate to a full production release by fixing any critical bugs and increasing the overall stability of the release.  

The Mifos 2.2.1 release is targeted for the beginning of October and will include a new REST API module. This enhancement will make it much easier to integrate Mifos with third party systems and applications including mobile user interfaces, mobile payments, accounting systems, HR systems, and more.

The Mifos Data migration toolkit developed by the SunGard Mifos team is now available as a Beta release. The Mifos data migration toolkit can be used to migrate legacy system data into Mifos for MFIs running a Windows environment.

This tool will help Mifos Specialists reduced the time to deploy Mifos. Through the convenient upload of an Excel spreadsheet via the data migration tool, they can more efficiently migrate historical loan and client data.  The tool will map the data according to your general ledger accounts and specified Mifos configuration.  Currently the Data Migration Toolkit has been tested for Mifos version 2.1 and covers the following functions:

This past week, we released the latest hotfix, Mifos 2.1.5. This hotfix includes the following fixes and enhancements: 

• Changes to mandatory savings amounts are now accurately reflected in the UI and appear correctly in the collection sheet report
• Issues/withdrawals amount is now displaying correctly in the collection sheet entry pipeline
• Improvements to Question Group query to improve loading speeds of center, group, and client pages

• Improvements to the batch job that generates meetings for savings

• Ensuring that removed fees no longer show on the 'Review installments' and 'Preview Loan account information' pages

• Fixed for collection sheet error: "The amount specified for <Loan product> of customer <customer name> is invalid. Please specify valid amount."

MFIs on the latest codebase should upgrade to this new version. Please view the release notes for a full list of issues fixed. Follow the upgrade instructions for a smooth upgrade.