CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi,
i'm looking into capabilities of Civicrm. We may yet go with SalesForce but I worry about limitations of the the 10 user license - could this limit our ability to develop processes and workflows where we can assign tasks and cases to individual volunteers. I'd be interested in any regularly occurring situations that anyone has found where individual user accounts are very helpful. Any specifics on how having unlimited user accounts will benefit us?

I'm wondering about implementation of some features we needed. Can anyone say if and/or how these would be handled in civicrm? If some are very standard, then I'd just like to be assured of that. Handling of course attendance is of particular concern.

Events and courses:
One day events: need enquiry  & registration process. This is probably straight forward.
Multi-day or courses with weekly sessions. Want to record attendance for each day of a multi- session course. For student be able to see a history of which courses they attended and how many sessions in each course. Be able to categorise courses according to level and or other grouping and filter students according to attendance within a level or course-grouping.

Student records
Some students are members while others attend event/course on ad-hoc basis. Memberships will probably fall into a couple of categories. General record details would be the same for all but there will be some details specific to each category. There are also those who volunteer in different capacities so that's another type of detail.

Issue tracking:
Dealing with enquiries, student requests or issues and any other constituent tasks: Be able to track each issue through from start to finish, assign each to a volunteer or a department.

Task and project assignments:
Some volunteers oversee at department level, some work within one or more depts on on-going basis, some handle a specific project over a longer period and some carry out short duration tasks. It's be useful to assign people to depts, projects, tasks and be able to track open tasks/projects. Good to be able to quickly see who works in which areas or on which projects and tasks. It'd be useful to see this detail on a persons profile too. Do people use civicrm for this kind of organisation management.

External data synchronisation: Member records need to be kept in synch with an external system. What mechanisms are used?

Internal/external mailing lists:
We use a mailing list system that can be hooked to db queries. Any advantages/disadvantages to using internal civimail. Bounce management maybe?


Any advice on any of the above areas appreciated.

Thanks.

Hi,
I'm not familiar with SalesForce as yet. As I understand it you get the full enterprise version. If we went with SalesForce, we would use the services of a chartiy org which asists other charities in setting up SalesForce. I don't yet know what extra apps they would employ although I understand that to deal with events and courses, there is an app they use. We've had  presentation so far and probably would have further consultation on requirements before engaging with them.

Sorry I don't have much detail.

Dave has already stated what you can expect as far as functionality goes. His point about owning your own data is pretty important too! And I can certainly imagine you need additional stuff for your multiday events in Salesforce as well.
So give CiviCRM a go, I am sure you will be happy with what it can offer.

no estimate for recurring events since it has not been funded and hence work has not started

lobo

most new work comes in via:

a. code contributions
b. worked on during sprints
c. Make It Happen
d. Consulting projects that the core team undertakes

a and b broadly come under the umbrella of "voluntary development" work

I took a look at the 4.3 top 10 list: http://civicrm.org/blogs/colemanw/top-10-reasons-get-excited-civicrm-43

and here's the classification with regard to the above:

a. 1 (this was huge and probably was 2-10 combined in terms of hours!)
b. 8, 7, 4
c. 10
d. 9, 7, 6, 5, 3, 2

lobo

Thanks again for replies.
Lobo, that provides some clarity on code contributions. So for 4.3, most contributions were voluntary, given the size of Accounting Integration.

Erik, thanks for the link. I'll read that, or the bits I'm interested in. I'll try to get a handle on the overall architecture, drupal integration and api as well as the modules of particular interest.

I'm new to php, having avoided getting involved with it for a long time; maybe civicrm will push me into it. Familiar with perl, c++, java so that should help.

The Drupal module for multiday events is:  http://drupal.org/project/civicrm_multiday_event 

yeah it works great for me.