CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi,

Recently found out about CIVI CRM.  Very pleased - thanks to everyone that works on this project.  Pretty amazing what's been done.

Am looking at using CIVI CRM as the client management component for a mobile application that will deliver two types of services:
- Energy efficiency services for homeowners in our region
- Intake of clients at soup kitchens, shelters and food pantries.

Part of my work is to research the opportunity to use these systems are part of a team of organizations within a larger region.

A couple of questions
- Has anyone been working in these community spaces with CIVI CRM?  I would be interested in hearing about their experiences
- I read the comprehensive guide document last night (it was late and the doc is long) and maybe I missed this.  Are there ways to upload supporting documents about a client to their client records?  We produce a lot of collateral files, reports, images, drawings, proposals, etc that need to be part of the client's overall record.  Is this there now or would we have to write this functionality
- Hosting sites - I plan on setting up a box over the next few days to start experimenting but long term our roll out would need to be in a hosted site for security, etc.  Is there a list of vendors with experience in this system that we should start dialoging with?
- Anything else that anyone can think of for a newbie like me.  Ideas appreciated.  Sure that I'll be back with more questions later.

Best,

Chuck Schwartz
LI Green / EECO Homes
www.ligreen.com
www.eecohomes.org
chuck@ligreen.com

You might want to dig into the CiviCase case management component (particularly for the intake task). You can configure any number of activity types to represent the steps in a process. Each activity can carry file attachments (generically). As Xavier noted, you can also define custom fields of type "File" to hold specific types of attachments. Custom fields can be defined at the "contact" level and / or the "activity" level (and for most other record types).

Quite a few human service orgs using CiviCRM... a few examples:
- Physician Health Program British Columbia co-sponsored and uses CiviCase - http://www.physicianhealth.com/
- The Cara Program - http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,14862.msg63465.html#msg63465