Specialist Spotlight: Hugo Technologies

This month we want to bring attention to the strong work that Hugo Technologies is doing in the Mifos community. They are supporting Mifos customers and building new functionality not only in India but in multiple continents around the world. This post is part of the regular blog series, Specialist Spotlight, on the COSM blog that will shine the light on some of our top Specialists. Not only do we want to recognize them for their accomplishments, we want others to learn from the approach they’ve taken to promote and implement Mifos. Mifos Specialists are one of the most crucial links in our community – they are the driving force that is promoting and supporting Mifos worldwide.

Head over to the COSM blog to read about Hugo Technologies and their global push.

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!

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Mifos X – The Next Generation

Fresh off the recent Margaret H release, we’ve published the product roadmap for 2012. SolDevelo will be leading the community as it develops new functionality and extends the reporting and accounting capabilities for the upcoming year.  With current development plans squared away, I wanted to share with you what’s in store for the future. Our vision for Mifos is to be the operational platform to deliver financial services to the poor – whatever your methodology, however you reach your clients, we want to be the lightweight technology powering your outreach.

 I sat down with the leads for our community architecture team, Keith and John Woodlock, to discuss with them the Mifos X project, the long-term development initiative that will provide the community a revamped platform for scale and extensibility.

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Announcing the Vinolia I Release and 2012 Product Roadmap

We are pleased to announce the 2012 Product Roadmap including our next major upcoming release of Mifos, Vinolia I.  Vinolia is a member of Lumana Credit in Atorkor, Ghana. With access to credit and entrepreneurial training from their staff, she is increasing her income and improving the lives of her seven children.

Vinolia has been a fish monger her enter life and has been using her loan from Lumana to supplement her income and expand her business to selling spicy porridge.  Unfortunately Vinolia recently lost her entire house including her savings and loan passbook to a fire.  With up to date records in Mifos and utilizing the notes field in her client profile, Lumana was able to craft a flexible approach to disaster relief and repayment for Vinolia.  Lumana’s outreach is focused on rural women in Ghana – they are looking forward to continued enhancements on the way in Mifos improving ability to survey and capture information through mobile devices.

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Aligning Volunteer Passion with User Pain

4549865709_0c58f4c739_bHead on over to the Community for Open Source Microfinance blog for a post on how we’re trying to help channel the passion and talents of our volunteers to solve the needs and pains of our users. We recently published the process for requesting new features and voting on suggestions to make their way into the product roadmap.  The product roadmap is what guides our volunteer contributors and we want it be user-driven so they can provide new features that directly meet your business requirements. Our Community Feature Requests Dashboard captures all feature requests that have come in and provides a visual glimpse of how the product management team prioritizes your feedback.

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Announcing the Margaret H Release

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.

Margaret Matinde has been a Nuru client for three years. Throughout this time, Nuru gave her the ability to save and the opportunity to take out a loan to start a successful restaurant business. Now instead of struggling to provide for her children, she can send them to school and focus on building their future. For the past year and a half, Nuru has been using Mifos to administer loans and savings accounts to clients like Margaret through their Community Economic Development program.  Rebecca Herrington and her team have been an active and engaged community member throughout the transition.

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Star Contributor of the Month – Lukasz Chudy

For the month of January 2012, we’re showcasing Lukasz Chudy, one of the many Lukasz’ at SolDevelo. Lukasz has stepped up to lead QA in the community during the recent transition of Mifos. You can find Lukasz on JIRA helping to orchestrate many a smooth release and strengthening the quality of Mifos so it MFIs can better serve the poor. 

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Mifos 2.2.3 is Released

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.

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Mifos 2.2.2 Ships

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.

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Mifos 2.2.2 Ships

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.

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