Open Source

Recently we successfully upgraded one of our client CiviCRM install from v2.1 to v3.1.2. Over all I was pretty happy with the CiviCRM upgrade process considering client's db was in bad shape. This client is one of the early adopters of CiviCRM, ( since v1.8 ) that made things bit worse.

Few things you should remember before starting upgrade:

1. Backup your working CiviCRM database

Web-Reporter is used to create Graphical repesentation of the data from the database. This is reporting tool which is useful for quickly and easily building interactive reports from data sources.

Web Reporter is developed using the Zend framework. It comprises of following important aspects.

Web reporter is a graphical development environment used to produce report populated by data from any database. It allows creation of simple reports through graph, charts and text report. Report can be easily created by any user within few minutes.

Every organization uses reporting in one form or another. As a result, reporting is considered an important operation that can allow you to predict your organization's results, if you are good in analysis. This is also called Business Intelligence(BI).

Recently a client asked us if we could develop a BI application. Just to make sure that we were on the same page we checked if she would define for us what she meant by BI. She was very clear in what she wanted. What I was not sure of, was was it BI ? Or was it just a reporting application.

CiviReport a thought planned to overcome one of the shortcomings of CiviCRM to have a featured Reporting Functionality has indeed taken CiviCRM to altitudes.

CiviReport was initiatied based on the success of Custom Search, designed with 14 report templates the birth of CiviReport was with the release of CiviCRM 2.2.7 and each of the 14 reports covered a specific reporting area which included individuals Contact Details, Contribution, Memberships and Events.

While building a POC for a business analytics application which emphasized on faster data retrieval from business driven queries on a large volume of data, we knew we had to think out of the MySQL box. Retrieving data using MySQL, especially when the data is very huge, can take quite long.
 
We had to handle the 0.2 million records. The query involved searching through all of the records and took 15 odd minutes when we implemented it using MySQL :-(
 

 
 
Email listing and Management component, helps to build email list which creates an initial audience for their hilarious-but-serious video clip which sends traffic back to their site which builds the email list even further which helps them grow a donor base which helps fund the website. Just like a pyramid scheme.
 

It was very challenging to work on 3.0 feature set and my team worked really hard to ensure release was as per schedule. Now that CiviCRM v3.0 alpha1 is out, I can shed some light on my favorite features in 3.0

Usability

* Navigation Menu, I bet this will help to reduce number of clicks needed to navigate inside CiviCRM.

* “Create New” (Shortcuts select) and “Recently Viewed” blocks ( shows recently modified / viewed objects)

NTEN recently released the results of a CRM satisfaction survey they did a few months ago. It was a pleasure to receive the CiviCRM report card. We had never done a survey of our users, so this was good feedback and a big morale boost to the entire team. Some highlights of the CRM survey with regard to the survey are listed below: I've borrowed liberally from Geilhufe's forum post on this topic.

An article appeared in the Yahoo! India News section dated 12^th April 2006, which applauded CiviCRM for bringing about a change into the CRM world.

Being Open Source and free, the Non-Profit organizations view CiviCRM as a blessing bestowed on them for managing contacts and other information of the donors, donations, and information about people involved in it. What’s more? CiviCRM is scalable, meaning, it can be improved further and redistributed. It also has a mass mailer that will leave you awestruck. The fact that a basic training of 3 Hours in CiviCRM can get the User started in using it, comes as another surprise.