CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We've been working with CiviCase for a couple months now and are setting it up for a youth shelter client. They will be hosting the system internally using Drupal 6 / CiviCase 2.2.7. We spent a solid month working with their operations person to go through their existing paper documentation and identify key information to capture.

We'll continue to add our findings to the CiviCase documentation since we ran into a few hiccups/errors that we were able to resolve with Dave Greenberg's assistance.

Here are some of the highlights of the installation.

• They have several programs, so we are setting each one up as a different case type
• They have about 80 activities and 60 groups of custom data fields across the different programs
• Fields that were common to all the programs are included as custom fields for the Open Case activity
• Many of the fields are set to searchable so that they will show up in the Advanced Search
• We did not use any special characters in the Activity names (we think it caused one of the hiccups/errors we mentioned earlier)
• We did not use the "reuse options" feature for fields with multiple choice options (ditto on the hiccups/errors)

We held an initial Webinar about our CiviCase process in June. We plan to hold another Webinar after we finish this configuration phase and a third one after working on their reports. It's been a fun, challenging, and interesting project.

Questions? Comments? Let us know.

Hi Craig,
There's a 'bias' in the CiviCase design that most case-related info should be captured using activities. The reasoning is that when you record something about a case, it's useful to know when it was recorded and by whom (to give context and build the 'case story').

So, if "Case Notes" are general entries about the case made by staff as the case progresses ... then you can create an activity type called "Case Notes" and make it avaiiable for your various case types. Then users can select that Activity Type and enter their notes anytime they need to. These would show on case reports etc.

You can also limit this activity type to only occurring once in a case - so then users would just add more text / edit the Case Notes activity item - rather than having multiple entries.

Finally, there's the possibility of using a "hook" in a custom module to highlight the content of a given activity type (in this case your Case Notes) by displaying it in the Case Summary section of the Manage Case page. This is documented here (with an example):

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMUPCOMING/CiviCRM+hook+specification#CiviCRMhookspecification-hookcivicrmcaseSummary

Keep us posted on your progress. We're quite interested in having folks share their CiviCase implementations via blog posts, case studies etc.