Community News Log

Mifos Android Client - A Closer Look

The Mifos Android client has been available in the Google Play store for a couple months now so hopefully you've had a chance to try it out. If not, we wanted to give you a closer look at the smartphone version of the Mifos application that gives you instant access to your data wherever you have a mobile phone connection. The Mifos Android client was developed by SolDevelo who is ready to respond to feedback with fixes and enhancements to make it perform even better. The video screencast, data sheet overview, and Mifos Android Client user manual will give you a clearer picture of the features available.

What is the Mifos Android Client?

Let's first cover the basics of what the Mifos Android Client is and what features it supports. It's a mobile version of Mifos available as a smartphone application that runs on top of the Android operating system. You can freely download the application from the Google Play store and through a handy interface for a smartphone you have instant access to your client data anywhere there's a mobile connection. Right now these first versions of the Android client focus on viewing client data and making transactions. – making the loan officer more efficient and more informed in the field. It supports the core functional operations including:

Posted by edcable on May 21, 2012 at 2:14pm

User Meetup - Join Us Thursday May 10

Thanks again to those who attended our last User Meetup on April 26. We had good attendance as we watched the demonstration of the Mifos-ACC accounting module from Hugo Technologies, FinA, and Conflux. Notes from the meeting have been added to the wiki and if you'd like to see how Mifos-ACC works, check out the video demonstration.

Posted by edcable on May 10, 2012 at 1:56pm

User Meetup - Join Us Thursday April 26

Update: We had a great turnout for our April 26 user meetup - a dozen people turned out to catch the demo of the Mifos-ACC accounting module led by Shiva from Hugo Technologies. We had several new meetup participants from our Africa community so happy to see you there and look forward to you attending again in the future. Notes from the meeting have been added to the wiki and if you'd like to see how Mifos-ACC works, check out the video demonstration.

Thank again to those who attend our last User Meetup on April 12. George Lteif from Al Majmoua shared a nice presentation that helped to connect the community over similar challenges being faced. Here's a link to George's presentation and the notes from the meeting if you weren't able to attend.

Posted by edcable on April 24, 2012 at 6:56pm

Star Contributor of the Month - Chetan Bekkinkeri

For the month of March 2012 and in honor of National Volunteer Week, we're recognizing Chetan Bekkinkeri who has been leading product management and requirements gathering for our community over the past several months. For the past couple years Chetan has been part of the SunGard team contributing to Mifos in various ways; when we asked him to step into the role as product management lead for the community he did so with great energy. Keep contributing so we can shine the spotlight on you!

Chetan has taken on his role in the community with great pride and commitment - he is always available to meet with a user and listen to their needs. Chetan is using his skills as a business analyst and his strong knowledge of the microfinance domain to serve as our critical bridge between users and developers. His ability to take complex and varied user needs and translate these into clear, concise, and consistant functional specifications for development is unmatched. Chetan is always ready to hear your product feedback and reminds you to review the specs he's been generating.

Read on for more about Chetan!

Posted by edcable on April 20, 2012 at 7:40am

How You Can Get Involved

To celebrate National Volunteer Week, we wanted to take the opportunity to thank all our volunteers and put out a call for more support from new volunteers who want to partake in movement to create a world of 3 Billion Maries. Our volunteers and their tireless commitment to Mifos have helped the community as it's transitioned from Grameen Foundation to leadership under the Community for Open Source Microfinance. As we look to grow our community throughout 2012 and beyond there are many ways to get involved - it's not just software development, we need help buiding community, fundraising, marketing, and more.

Head over to the COSM blog to read how you can get involved.

Posted by edcable on April 18, 2012 at 4:26pm

User Meetup - Join Us Thursday April 12

Help us keep up the momentum from our last user meetup where we had more than a dozen in attendance and 4 continents represented. We'll be having another community-wide user meetup on Thursday Apr 12 3:30pm GMT and would like to get as many users to attend once again. Please add this invite to your calendar.

Posted by edcable on April 10, 2012 at 5:57pm

Centering on the Client – Open and Transparent Microfinance

Across the industry there's a big movement towards deeper client protection, broader transparency, and overall fairness in the delivery of financial services to the poor. Technology should play its role in ushering in a phase of more responsible financial inclusion. A couple recent posts from CGAP on disclosure and the Center for Financial Inclusion spurred a brainstorm I'd like our community to have on how we can better implement tools, surveys, forms, and processes in Mifos to help advance fair and responsible microfinance. We wrote a post on the COSM blog exploring the topic. Does smarter microfinance = open source microfinance?

Help us answer this question by discussing it on our Facebook page.

Posted by edcable on April 10, 2012 at 5:47pm

Mifos X - The Next Generation

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.

Posted by edcable on April 10, 2012 at 5:39pm

Vinolia I Release and 2012 Product Roadmap Announced

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.

Posted by edcable on April 4, 2012 at 10:54pm

Upcoming User Meetup - Join Us!

This Thursday, we're hosting our first User Meetup that we have had in a while. We have a packed agenda that we would like to share including:

Introduction of the Community for Open Source Microfinance and its role in the community
Demonstration of functionality in the recent Margaret H release
User presentation from Srinivasan Rao at Nirantara
Presentation of 2012 Product Roadmap and overview of Community Feature Requests Dashboard
General Open Office Hours for feedback/troubleshooting

Add the invite to your calendar for Thursday March 29 3:30pm GMT.

Building bonds between users

We intend to host these meetings every other week. Our goal is to provide a regular time in which users can interact with fellow implementers and have a more active conversation than the mailing list can provide.

We want this meeting to help address two challenges in the community - 1) helping users overcome challenges implementing and using Mifos by sharing their experiences with fellow users and 2) helping community developers understand user needs and product requirements by establishing a more direct connection.

Posted by edcable on March 27, 2012 at 8:59am