Milan,
These are fantastic question that our entire user community can benefit
from seeing answered. I can already tell you're looking deeply into
Mifos and asking good critical questions to help you fully understand
it.
I've answered your questions below inline to the best of my knowledge
and forwarded to our mifos-users mailing list so others from our team
and user community can respond with their input.
If you haven't already subscribed to mifos-users, please do so at:
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Hello Ed,
I've been testing Mifos for most of the day, and have a few question /
concerns:
1) I note on your roadmap that the next release of the software
includes " Question Groups" Data Collection Tool", which is meant to
replace both survey and additional fields functionality.
This is good to hear, as many of the issues I've encountered today
revolve around how this data is entered, managed, and presented through
the front-end, and how it resides in the database.
Prosperitas has a section in which it collects user's economic data,
which involves questions and subquestions (for example, there is one
overall question for what assets a client has, what is the nature &
value of those assets., as well as related questions about debt which
should be in same survey). Currently grouping these questions and
subquestions into one survey does not seem to be doable within current
Mifos functionality; is this Question Group module intended to resolve
this?
[EC] Yes, the Question Groups module is intended to be a much more
flexible and dynamic means of capturing data at various stages of your
workflow. You can create question groups and assign these to any of 15
different stages of the workflow in Mifos (i.e. Create Client, Approve
Loan, Create Savings, View Center, etc.) Within each question group you
can set up sections and then questions within each section. So for your
scenario, I would suggest setting up a section as the parent question
and then having the sub-questions be within that section.
You can test out the Question Groups functionality on our Test Server
(http://ci.mifos.org:8085/mifos/) with the user id mifos and password
testmifos. You can also view the functional spec for Question Groups:
http://mifosforge.jira.com/wiki/display/MIFOS/Question+Groups+Functional
+Spec
Also I imagine that this would involve substantial changes to the data
structure; would upgrade to new version involve migrating the data to
new tables as required?
[EC] Yes, you are correct that this does involve substantial changes to
the data structure. For upcoming Leila E release, there will be an
automatic migration of all existing additional fields and their
corresponding database tables into the question group fields and their
question group database tables. I'll defer to one of our engineers to
speak to the specifics of how the database tables are changing and how
the automatic migration works.
2) Also with regards to usability in both additional fields as well as
surveys:
--it would be pretty important to be able to adjust order of fields (old
and new) in all aspects of application. I've encountered one problem in
which the "Second Last Name" field comes before the "Last Name" field on
the client data entry screen; as almost everyone has two last names in
Latin America, this would likely lead to a situation in which the names
are flipped at point of data entry.
[EC] Both of your suggestions here are good enhancement requests that
could be logged in our issue tracker. Details on how to do this are on
this page: http://mifos.org/product/features/request-new-feature
In Question Groups, you can change the order of fields freely. However,
the "personal information" fields (non additional fields or non question
group fields) can't be sorted. You can specify whether some or mandatory
or hidden but can't currently sort the order. I would suggest filing
this as an enhancement request.
Regarding the order of the "Second Last Name" and "Last Name" fields - I
definitely agree that the Last Name field should come before Second Last
Name and would file a separate enhancement request just to flip the
order of these two fields.
--a minor annoyance is the inability to select multiple items to add to
a list: for example, in creating a survey, you have to add each question
one by one to the survey, because you can't select multiple questions to
add.
[EC] This indeed is a usability issue that Question Groups functionality
addresses - you can multiple questions at a time with the new Question
Groups functionality.
3) Finally I came across this item on your website which suggests that
Mifos only handles 7 digits before the decimal:
http://mifosinitiative.uservoice.com/forums/25170-mifos-software/suggest
ions/474216-digits-before-decimal?ref=title
In my short period of testing today, I have not yet come across this
issue; however, this is an obvious concern for us considering that USD 1
buys about 1839 Colombian pesos. Could you please clarify in what parts
of the application this issue is a problem, if at all?
[EC] Milan - Good sleuthing in that you came across this page J this was
an issue that was fixed in our Mifos 1.5 release. Mifos now supports up
to 14 digits before the decimal. You can see full details about when
this was fixed in our issue tracker, #1537 -
http://mifosforge.jira.com/browse/MIFOS-1537
Your assistance is appreciated.
[EC] Glad to have you in our community and will send to you more details
about Mifos Cloud shortly.
Cheers,
Ed
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