Support (offered by community volunteers) > Usability Improvements

What part of CiviCRM are you having difficulty with right now?

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Dave Greenberg:
If there are regular tasks in CiviCRM that you (or your clients / users) find difficult, and you have suggestions for how to make them easier - please post your experiences and feedback here. The more specific you can be in describing the issues and potential solutions - the better! Feel free to attach screenshot snippets etc. to help explain things.

We hope to continue improving the usability, and efficiency of CiviCRM in coming releases. You can help by letting us know "what hurts".

xavier:
The import from another source is quite frankly a pain.

Quite often, the data source isnot  100% correct (eg one country is "US" instead of the needed "USA", or "United state of", or whatever the format you expect). Instead of not importing the contact at all, it should be possible to import as it is (eg with the country empty).

The error reporting makes it even worse (you have to download a csv to find the guilty contacts, with error messages that are not that clear). Why don't you display them on the page ?

In my dream land, I'd like to import, got an error message "X invalid contacts (link to visible list ) , would you import them anyway and correct later ?" if yes, I got the list of problematic one with link to the contact edit so it can be fixed.

Provide predefined mapping for standard formats (hint, outlook ;)

Make it easier to do "split import" (organisation at the same time as the individual contacts (if the organisation exists, add the contact to the organisation, if not, create it and uses the contact infos, like address...)

I'd be great to have a "tainted" flag on the contact, so that's easy to spot contacts that need manual cleanup.

Last, be less anal on the format (eg M=Mr=male=MALE=Male all should work, UK=United kingdom=England=Scotland...), and more clear when you expect an specific one (gender should be Female or Male, instead of having to guess)

The linkedin way (letting them connect to your gmail/yahoo account) is very convenient, but unfortunately pass the wrong message (that's ok to give to one service provider the login/pwd from another one).

X+

PS. I used to live in Glasgow, I bloody know that that's different than England, but you until get rid of England, Wales and Northern Ireland, let's import all under UK, shall we ?

geilhufe:


--- Quote ---Provide predefined mapping for standard formats (hint, outlook Wink
--- End quote ---

Anyone had a saved import mapping for outlook they want to share? If someone builds the mapping on demo.civicrm.org or their local install, then perhaps it can be grabbed and packaged up with the distro.

(I'll let other comment on the feasibility)

Any takers?

xavier:
We have one on our install, I need some guidance on what to export, but willing to share.

How, on the import, a really nice to have feature: being able to set a standard value to be used for all the imported contacts :

eg "outlook address mike" -> source

X+

Dave Greenberg:
An SQL dump of the the record from civicrm_mapping and the related civicrm_mapping_field rows should cover it. We can then look at folding that into the fixed data for 2.1.

BTW - it would be helpful if you have a way of helping us verify that the mapping you've got is reasonably generic (e.g. would be accurate / useable for all or most Outlook users). I don't know enough about variations in Outlook versions, configuration etc. to have a sense of this.

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