Re: [Mifos-users] [Mifos-developer] Whats after Maya G?

[Keith W. <kei...@gm...>]

Ed,

your probably right. I think its a good thing to get the users/MFIs
together in any medium possible to flesh out what is critical from a
product point of view.

regards,
Keith.

On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 3:30 PM, Ed Cable <ed...@gm...> wrote:
> Keith,
>
> I think thread may have gotten a bit too technical in discussion and some
> users didn't realize original intent of thread.
>
> Do you want to start up another individual thread on mifos-users regarding
> functional improvements users would like to see? I'm certain built-in or
> integrated accounting, automatic fees, support for photos or file
> attachments, business rules between loan and savings accounts would be some
> of the requests.
>
> I think we're overdue for a community-wide user meeting then can narrow down
> some of the functional improvements community would like to see as we start
> a process for identifying, proposing, and then prioritizing community driven
> processes.
>
> Ed
>
> On Jul 1, 2011 5:13 AM, "Keith Woodlock" <kei...@gm...> wrote:
>> Binny,
>>
>>> Are we concentrating too much on technical improvements while not paying
>>> adequate attention to new/improved features?
>>
>> Yes, this is the whole point of this email chain. I was asking for
>> input/feedback from the users about what to put into mifos after Maya
>> G. So far only george has offered some insight into what might be
>> useful going forward. From a technical point of view we know what we
>> need to do but theres no point in taking on that investment unless
>> customers out there want further features/improvements etc
>>
>> regards,
>> Keith.
>>
>> On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 5:50 AM, Binny Gopinath <bin...@gm...>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Are we concentrating too much on technical improvements while not paying
>>> adequate attention to new/improved features?
>>>
>>> Technical improvements without any visible improvement to end-users - may
>>> cause users to consider moving away from Mifos. I would like releases to
>>> be
>>> a mix of new/improved functional features + a bunch of technical
>>> improvements. I have had the chance to get a glimpse into some of our
>>> competition and very soon our feature set is going to be insufficient,
>>> which
>>> is heartbreaking ..
>>>
>>> On technical improvements:
>>> - would be good to include testing/handling of larger volumes - I have
>>> had a
>>> couple of enquiries from large MFI's - one of them has 4+ million members
>>> - on i18n, would be good to allow overriding of specific
>>> internationalized
>>> labels look up from config folders - so that they do not get overwritten
>>> by
>>> any upgrades. And also handle date formats consistently, especially in
>>> reports.
>>>
>>> Thanks
>>> Binny
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 10:33 AM, Van Mittal-Henkle
>>> <va...@gr...> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> George,
>>>>
>>>> I'm catching up on some of these threads after being out for a few days
>>>>
>>>> > - there's a mobile revolution underway in sub-Saharan Africa; building
>>>> > both the APIs/hooks for connecting into a variety of mobile systems
>>>> > (from mobile money to mobile interfaces for clients and MFI staff to
>>>> > exchange of info with other systems that are running mobile apps) and
>>>> > also potentially getting a few sample/reference mobile apps running on
>>>> > Mifos (need to vet specific pain points so we don't build something
>>>> > just for the sake of building it)
>>>>
>>>> If Mifos provided Restful or WSDL based APIs it would open up lots of
>>>> possibilities for building on Mifos for things like this.  Having stable
>>>> APIs for people to build on is one of the things we have been working
>>>> towards for some time.  A lot of KeithW's efforts in particular have
>>>> been around getting internals to a state where we could start layering
>>>> an API on them.  As mentioned, getting specific customers with specific
>>>> use cases to drive this is key.
>>>>
>>>> > also for you and the other engineers who have worked on MIfos: in a
>>>> > community model if there's less oversight, is there under-the-covers
>>>> > work that should be prioritized which will help keep Mifos stable and
>>>> > scalable as it goes forward in the community?
>>>>
>>>> Here's where some big questions come up.
>>>>
>>>> One hypothesis is that there are two classes of Mifos users-- Class 1:
>>>> larger MFIs who have a need for various extensions and customizations of
>>>> Mifos and who can take on some expense to do that and even host their
>>>> own infrastructure and Class 2: smaller MFIs who could likely manage
>>>> with fewer features and less extensibility and who would benefit most
>>>> from low cost hosted access to Mifos.
>>>>
>>>> How to most effectively meet the needs of both users is tricky.
>>>>
>>>> We've been challenged by the current code base being difficult and
>>>> expensive to extend and maintain.  We have made progress in improving
>>>> the code and certain areas of it are much easier to deal with now.
>>>> However, there is still a large amount of code left that needs
>>>> improvement.
>>>>
>>>> The most cost effective way to deliver a solution that can be
>>>> effectively hosted at very low cost (supporting multi-tenancy for
>>>> example) at this point looks like a rewrite that would pull in reusable
>>>> parts of Mifos but redo the basics from the ground up to get things like
>>>> multi-tenancy, transaction management, auditing, clean i18n, layered
>>>> architecture, separation of concerns and manageable tests in place.  To
>>>> keep the cost of doing a rewrite low, it would help for the target
>>>> release to have fewer features and options than Mifos currently does.
>>>>
>>>> On the other hand,  supporting larger existing and new MFIs and those
>>>> requiring the larger feature set currently supported by Mifos would
>>>> benefit from the current code base being extended and refined.  The
>>>> difficulty here is that the cost to continue maintaining the current
>>>> code is high as is the cost to refactor and improve it.
>>>>
>>>> Keith and I are in agreement on the things that he already laid out
>>>> here:
>>>> http://mifosforge.jira.com/wiki/display/MIFOS/Technical+Roadmap+%28Post+
>>>> Maya+G+and+onwards%29
>>>>
>>>> This is a good list of how the current code base could be moved forward.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Replacing the current Struts/JSP based UI code with Spring/Freemarker is
>>>> the biggest single enabler for lowering the cost of maintaining and
>>>> extending Mifos.  It leads to:
>>>> * API creation across the application (by achieving complete separation
>>>> of business logic from presentation code)
>>>> * simplified transaction management
>>>> * simplified i18n
>>>> * improvement of layered architecture
>>>> * reduction and simplification of test code
>>>>
>>>> --Van
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>> All of the data generated in your IT infrastructure is seriously
>>> valuable.
>>> Why? It contains a definitive record of application performance, security
>>> threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes
>>> sense of it. IT sense. And common sense.
>>> http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2d-c2
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Mifos-users mailing list
>>> Mif...@li...
>>> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mifos-users
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> All of the data generated in your IT infrastructure is seriously valuable.
>> Why? It contains a definitive record of application performance, security
>> threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes
>> sense of it. IT sense. And common sense.
>> http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2d-c2
>> _______________________________________________
>> Mifos-users mailing list
>> Mif...@li...
>> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mifos-users
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> All of the data generated in your IT infrastructure is seriously valuable.
> Why? It contains a definitive record of application performance, security
> threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes
> sense of it. IT sense. And common sense.
> http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2d-c2
> _______________________________________________
> Mifos-users mailing list
> Mif...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mifos-users
>
>