CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi - thumbs up for the progress on the Activities functionality. As I interpret this, it will help fill in the gap left by not having a more detailed 'change log' even though to do so means additional data entry. But since some of the changes that we need to track are in here (membership and contribution and emails etc) we might as well try and use this to record things such as the 'old address' of a person when we update their details (in case there proves to be a later problem with the new address - it happens!) or, even more usefully, recording that Person X has moved, their mail has been returned, so we want to have a record their old address, remove it from the contact details, and (because we are using Activities we can also lodge a task to try and track them down either via email, phone or verifying against an old version of an electoral (voter) roll).

Any comments on this approach to using Activities - since it isn't quite what you meant it for - meaning we are using it to log specific changes, even though they may not be, of themselves, an activity.

So that said, here are some other thoughts and questions.
1/
Activities records any email etc sent to a contact - which is great - but the 'sender' ends up with a record of every email they send. So if I initiate an email out to 2000 my Activities History becomes rapidly unusable due to the 'noise' generated. Is there any way that the 'record' on the 'sender' becomes 'emailed 438 contacts re ....." rather than listing each (or is this just a 1.9 problem I have?)

2/
IN 1.9 the 'description' is out of sync with the title - ie I click on Other Activities to add a new one, and when I select an Activity Type, a description pops up to the left of the field, only it is the description of the Type one below the one I selected. I dont' think this is an issue in 2.0 as you have a different approach.

3/
Where is there some documentation on how 'Cases' are being used alongside Activities. I am hoping this will be away for us to group activities (eg meetings the MPs have with constituents or organisations) tagged by the 'issues' the meeting was about, and/or the sector the people work in. I did some searching for Cases but am perhaps a bit ahead of you on this?

One of them is first version of case management functionality. Many nonprofits' work is organised around case-based actions: staff's activities are initiated with specific action, take specific set of tasks that need to be performed in order to "serve" it and can be named as successfully finished under specific conditions. Along that road, a lot of data is gathered, needs to be analysed, evaluated and decisions need to be made based on that. It's a very simple and generic vision of how case management works, since there is much more than that in different flavours of nonprofit work.

CiviCRM always had functionality available for storing information about interactions with contacts in the database, however never had any advanced mechanism that would allow ordering those interactions, grouping them and taking advantage of more detailed analysis of those interactions. With CiviReport introduced, a part of that gap has been stopped, however, it is still difficult to implement any kind of case management with CiviCRM. For that reason, we decided to implement very simple mechanism which would help to improve the situation. It is an uncomplicated tool - case management in CiviCRM 2.0 basically allows you to group single contact's activities into groups called cases. You can name the case, assign some categories to them, set the start and end dates date and - finally - go on with grouping activities under them.

I admit - we're not very fluent in case management. Within our team, we have some experience in human rights, medical and children care oriented case management, but it's not much. Our plan is to start with something very basic and turn to our community to tell us about real world needs,
teach us about mechanism that would make case oriented work easier and more effective. If your work include this kind of activities, make sure
you try out this new functionality in CiviCRM 2.0 when it's out and come back to us with tough love, ideas and suggestions!