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Hi.

I am new to CiviCRM and to the open source world, so forgive inappropriate or dumb questions, or using the wrong mechanisms to look for help.

We are looking at CiviCRM including CiviCase to provide a new solution for supporting our offices worldwide. A key requirement is creating a directory of Courses running in volunteer organisations all round the world. The Case module seems to be a good fit for this, but I seem to have hit a snag that someone might be able to help with?

We would need an organisation to be a client of the case for each course - so that the course lists under the Case tab for that organisation. At present it is possible to set up a Case with an organisation as client, but then when I want to add other case roles onto the case (to show volunteer individuals who are associated with the course (leader, admin, etc.) it appears to let me add them, but they do not appear to register in the DB, as they then do not show up on the record (but they do show up if the client is an individual).

Is this part of the design of case that makes it impossible to use Case in this way, or am I doing something wrong, or is there some config I can do?

Any help greatly appreciated

Marcus

Hi Dave

Thanks very much for a very prompt response & for the good news that the this might not be too big a deal.

Here's the application for us.

We maintain a directory of where an 'introduction to christianity' course developed by us is running in local churches all around the world. There are now thousands of such courses running. Local churches notify us that they are running the course (which they would typically run once, twice or three times a year. They tell us who the admin is on the course (our primary contact), who leads it, who leads the church, where the course runs, and how often it runs (plus a few other details like what variety, what language it runs in, etc.) We then run a 'Find A Course' site (currently written in Drupal) to allow enquirers to find a local course.

We have local offices in a number of countries that have limited tools at present to manage their CRM and their local country directory and we are looking at Civi as the tool to do the CRM and CiviCase to hold the directory. We think Case because we do not manage the events themselves and do not manage participants, we simply want to record an instance of the course running, link in to that the course administrator (as a role) as well as possibly other roles such as course leader, and then had assumed a few custom fields linked to a basic 'set up' activity to capture other details of the course. But to make the course show up against the church that is hosting it we wanted to make the client the church org. I am sure you appreciate that volunteers change regularly, and the administration gets passed on, but a church tends to remain, so it seemed most sensible to make it the client.

So that's the scenario. We would be open to using events to keep instances of courses, but we do also run events too (training events for local churches) so we would need to be able to segregate event types very clearly, and that just seemed a little less tidy. But open to your thoughts.

We do have some PHP skills in house (from our Drupal implementation) and would definitely intend to work with you an a Case fix if that seems appropriate. In fact our longer term plans (if I get the go-ahead for this) would probably lead us to contributing other dev efforts as we have a few areas where we might want to grow Civi's capability.

Let me know your thoughts & thanks in advance

Marcus

Thanks Dave.

Your thoughts on how to use the event module are very helpful and we will definitely explore them. I had not got as far in my thinking. Your ideas on use of the custom field option hook to make the links to orgs and individuals are great.

Of course what I love so much about the case module is that the roles already show up reciprocally in the individual or org's relationship tabs, so you see immediately how the person is involved in courses. This is really important to us. So I think we will sort out resources to look at the scale of the work to make the change.

Just a quick comment on your thoughts about 'organisation as client' for CiviCase, I would just mention that our current (commercial) software has a case module that is very flexible in its application, and the supplier finds it is a key differentiator for them in the not-for-profit sector. Their clients are membership organisations, professional bodies, etc. and so often there is some kind of process involving people, organisations, dates and activities such as tribunals, application processes, etc. which many more standard data models do not allow for. Case, if made really flexible, can provide solutions to many of these scenarios. I fully appreciate you already have a vision and roadmap for Case in mind, and I am coming in to this late in the day. But I did want to mention it.

Thanks again for your help. Will post back with findings sometime soon.

Hi Dave

Thanks for the background work you are doing on this and good to hear that the original sponsor team approve of this potential development. As you have seen I am trying to find a developer to do the work & submit for inclusion.

I understand where the team are coming from with their suggestion about opening up the 'with contact' field to be more flexible. I have already submitted a requirements document to those that have replied but I can see the value in what they are saying. Let's see how we get on with responses, and potentially we can include this too, but given that there is also an ability to assign the case to an individual, I am not sure (for us anyway) that this is a day 1 requirement. But there is other stuff we would like to do afterwards, and this could be included in that I am sure.