Community News Log

COSM ships Mifos X Platform 1.0

Mifos X Platform 1.0 is the first official release of the completely re-architected and re-written codebase that the Community for Open Source Microfinance has been working on since the transition of Mifos from the Grameen Foundation. As the next generation of the Mifos software, we are building off of everything we learned as the industry’s first web-based and open source software. We’re pleased to release the first open source platform for technology-enabled financial inclusion.

The Mifos X Platform is at the forefront of COSM’s strategy to scale Mifos through a community-driven development model and a network of local Specialists all contributing to a global cycle of innovation.

MIfos X is already being used in production in the cloud by a number of small MFIs. Elevate Africa from Mali and Heaven’s Family with operations in Latin America and Africa have been using Mifos for several months now. We welcome other small MFIs focused on individual lending to use a free hosted instance of Mifos X in the cloud.

Musoni has chosen Mifos X as the platform to to scale their award-winning mobile microfinance model pioneered at Musoni Kenya as the first “cashless microfinance institution in the world.” They are already putting the platform to work, building out applications and an interface specific to their operational model.

Posted by edcable on May 9, 2013 at 1:19pm

Google Summer of Code 2013 - End Poverty. One Line of Code at a Time

This summer you'll have the ability to change lives - three billion of them - one line of code at a time. The Community for Open Source Microfinance (COSM) and it's Mifos X project will be participating in Google Summer of Code for the third time. Mifos X is an open source technology platform for enabling financial inclusion to the poor. Google Summer of Code is a global program sponsored by Google that offers students stipends to write code for open source projects. Students accepted to the program will spend their summers coding from June 17 to September 23rd and upon successful evaluation receive a $5000 stipend provided by Google. For full details on GSoC, read the FAQ and browse the program timeline - student applications open April 22! You can apply from our organization page.

Posted by edcable on April 18, 2013 at 8:26am

ThoughtWorks HSP team gives Mifos X community a solid footing to grow from

I'd like to give a big thank you to the ThoughtWorks HSP team. Their team has only been a part of our community a few weeks but it seems like they've been with us for years. They've helped us at a critical time in the launch of Mifos X to our developer community. They're putting the infrastructure in place to guide a smooth transition to our community-driven development model on top of the Mifos X platform.

Here's a guest post from Gurpreet on what's been keeping them busy so far.

Recently, folks from ThoughtWorks started contributing to Mifos X as part of their Humanitarian Software Program (HSP). HSP is a ThoughtWorks initiative to help Humanitarian Open Source projects by channelizing beach and volunteer time of ThoughtWorkers. Gurpreet & Deepali from the HSP team at ThoughtWorks work full-time in connecting ThoughtWorkers to Open Source projects adopted under the HSP Program.

ThoughtWorks HSP Team

(From left to right Gurpreet, Khushal, Deepali, Sailee, Priti)

Posted by edcable on April 3, 2013 at 9:36pm

Optimizing UX for Mifos X - Deanna "Takes 3" to Join our Community

Deanna McCusker

One of the hallmarks of the current Mifos product is its simple and familiar browser-based user interface. As we launch our new Mifos X platform, we want to retain the essence of this user-friendly UI while injecting a modern refresh into the design of the platform. As a platform, we aim to have one consistent user experience with products and applications that are as usable and accessible to our global community as Mifos has been.

Posted by edcable on March 25, 2013 at 11:45pm

Mifos 2.6 (Esha K) is Live

As we close out 2012 and bring in 2013, we are excited to roll out the final major release on top of the Mifos 2.x codebase. With its fourth major release, SolDevelo has wrapped up Esha K, our Mifos 2.6 release. The theme of Mifos 2.6 was to fill any major outstanding gaps and make Mifos 2.6 be the most polished and well-rounded application for group lending before we transition development to our lighter, more flexible, next-generation platform Mifos X. Major new functionalities include support for daily loans and savings accounts, the ability to upload and attach files to loans and clients, a user interface for modifying the chart of the accounts, a dashboard of key business metrics on the homepage, and enhancements to importing data in Mifos.

Apart from these many new features, more than 45 bugs were also fixed by the SolDevelo team. We will also soon be shipping as separate releases enhancements to accounting and reporting - Hugo Technologies has completed a range of enhancements to the Mifos-ACC accounting module and Conflux Technologies will be delivering a few additional standard reports to our Business Intelligence Suite. Please join us in thanking Lukasz C, Natalia, Kasia, Kamil, Wojciech, Pawel, Grzegorz, Marcin, Jakub P, Jakub W, Lukasz W and the rest of the SolDevelo team who led the development of these new features and helped to review incoming contributions.

Posted by edcable on December 21, 2012 at 10:34pm

Specialist Spotlight - SolDevelo

We like to focus in on our Specialists every once a while, recognizing their contributions and providing a more personal glimpse into their organization and team. This time around we're taking a closer look at SolDevelo. SolDevelo has been playing a crucial role as the technical stewards of the Mifos 2.0 codebase. Head over to the COSM blog to read about each member of the team and what their plans are for Mifos in 2013 including continued expansion of their hosted service, MifCloud.

Read the Specialist Spotlight on SolDevelo.

Posted by edcable on November 9, 2012 at 9:21pm

Remixing Microfinance - Reflecting on our Vision

This past week there was a virtual conference led by CGAP and Microsave on Client Insights as well as blog post from Ignacio Mas on remixing microfinance. Both these topics on focusin on client data and looking at way to create hybrid models of delivering financial services were a good follow-on to our vision session at the Mifos Summit. It got me reflecting on our product vision that was beginning to emerge at the summit. Technology often constrains what an MFI should do rather than enable it. We aim to make Mifos X a flexible platform that puts no limits on how an MFI can design and deliver their financial services.

To learn more about product vision, read the full blog post.

Posted by edcable on October 31, 2012 at 7:00am

Announcing the Esha K Release

Esha K is going to be the final major functional release on the Mifos 2.0 codebase. We have chosen to recognize Esha Omar Athman as the Marie for our release. Esha is a client of Fursa Leo Microfinance who is being supported by Intrasoft Technologies out of Mombasa, Kenya. Esha has been a client since July 2011 and used her loans to fund her growing ice cubes business. Esha K is a big release containing major functional changes to the core including added support for daily meetings, loan repayments, and savings collections. Other major enhancements include a dashboard of key performance indicators on the homepage, an interface for editing the chart of accounts, and a file upload module.

Please visit the COSM blog to read the full announcement.

Posted by edcable on October 11, 2012 at 7:00am

Mifos 2.5 (Samiha J) Ships!

Once again a special thank you to Jakub Slawínski, Lukasz Chudy and the entire SolDevelo team for developing and proceeding over Samiha J. Mifos 2.5 is another big release that brings a strong mix of functional improvements, technical enhancements, tools for getting data into Mifos, and integrations with other systems. Continuing with our 2012 goal of making Mifos 2.0 a functionally complete group lending MIS before we transition development over to Mifos X, Mifos 2.5 smooths out some of the core areas of the product and fills some of the major outstanding gaps.

View the release notes for a full list of all issues resolved.

Mifos Data Warehouse and 11 More Standard Reports now Embedded in Mifos

Easy reporting is always a challenge and a must-have for our users - this release makes available another 11 standard reports that can be directly run in Mifos without having to install any separate components. Embedding these reports that run off of the Mifos data warehouse was one of the next major phases of the Pentaho integration. To run these reports all you have to do is configure your second database as the Mifos data warehouse and execute the new batch job that runs ETL job which populates the Mios data warehouse.

Posted by edcable on September 19, 2012 at 5:38pm

Announcing the Samiha J Release

We're happy to announce Samiha J, our upcoming release scheduled to ship during the first week of September. This release is code-named after Samiha, one of the borrowers at Al Majmoua in Beirut Lebanon. Samiha J will provide support for daily loan repayments, ability to bulk edit existing client data, import transactions via spreadsheet, a configurable chart of accounts, and additional REST APIs. View the blog post for full details on the release or the release notes for all the tickets being worked on.

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Posted by edcable on July 18, 2012 at 12:41pm