07.19.2012 User Meetup

Agenda

Before each meeting we'll post a proposed agenda. You can add any item you would like to cover to the agenda by emailing the user list or editing this wiki page.

Session	Description	Presenter	Time
Introduction	We will also have an introduction of everyone on the call so the community can get more personally connected.	Ed Cable	5 min
Implementer Show & Tell	Miguel Joia Santos, Iniciativa Mifos Mozambique	Miguel	15 min
Discussion	Samiha J update \| Discussion on PPI/Social Performance Management	Ed	10 min
Demo/Tutorial	CloudFoundry Integration	Lukasz	15 min
Open Office Hours	Support/feedback

On the Call

Lassaad (enda - Tunisia)
Lukasz Chudy (Poland - SolDevelo - QA)
Miguel Joia Santos (Mifos Initiative Mozambique)
Patrick Asare-Frimpong (Ghana)
Nayan Ambali (Conflux - India)
Ashok (Conflux - India)
Marco (Quipu - Peru)
Arun (GK - India)
Keith (Ireland)
Ed (USA)

Notes

From: http://sync.in/zuYyeen9cO

Agenda:

- Presentation on Implementations in Namibia and Mozambique

- CloudFoundry Demonstration

- Mifos X and Samiha J update

- Social Performance Management discussion (PPI/Question Groups)

- Open Office Hours Discussion

Presentation from Miguel:

Started efforts in January 2010 when found Mifos on the internet.

Miguel represents SBS (service, business, and solutions)

2 other partners - ICC (Consulting) and Afrisis (Development)

ICC - provide training to several MFIs throughout Mozambique

Afrisis - team of 2 doing the implementation and maintenance of technology (Natu & Euclides)

First implementation started in April 2010

Support of Mifos community has been critical

Community Contributions:

Portuguese Translation

3 implementations

Mozambique

Associação Progresso (Cabo Delgado) - northern part of Mozambique

3500 members - basic group loans and compulsory savings - still using version 1.5 of Mifos

Several custom reports developed.

Pilot implementation - learned a great deal with them.

Profamilia Moçambique (Inhambane) - 600km from Maputo

1000 - 1500 members projected - 250 members right now - started 3 months ago

Group loans and compulsory savings

Namibia

Kongalend Financial Services

Financing solar system loans

More complex implementation - integration with electronic banking payments, insurance payments, custom reports, Pastel integration

Starting to roll out group loans - will be upgrading to new versions soon.

Ongoing projects (Now in half of the projects in Mozambique)

Mozambique

Associação Ophentana Wathiana (Nampula)

Will be doing group loans but using Mifos to provide loans to other associations as well.

NAM Créditos (Sofala)

Currently training them right now

Only individual loans right now

TSECO Microfinanças (Zambézia)

Will start in next 2 weeks

Individual loans

Namibia

Kongalend Financial Services (upgrade MIFOS)

Upgrade and extend other features as required.

Other Achievements

Customized report platform - to integrate other data as well.

Integration with Accounting

Integration with Pastel

e-banking integration

Insurance management integration

API based on the utilities services payments for loans repayment and deposits using channels:

ATMs

Over the counter in Banks

Would like to deploy at larger banks to get payments to get directly made over the ATM and data flows in through API.

Strengths:

Project management to do more efficient deployment

Partners with both knowledge in MF and IS - Mifos and Reports development

Business Development/Marketing

Lots of word of mouth marketing, case studies needed to find business

Weaknesses

MFIs with little experienice in MF - start it because they have funds or its trendy

Need to evolve with mifos and microfinance

NGOs not oriented towards efficiency

Can't fast track their knowledge and their knowledge on Mifos

Little technology knowledge - difficult to get people using Mifos

Dependence on funding for these programs - need to wait for these investments in MF

Funds are lower than they were in the past.

Market Challenges

About 150 MFIs in Mozamique including ASCAs which would be good opportunitie for ASCAs

National programs financing implementation

Loans management platform for agriculture cooperatives - advancing partnerships to do this

Could yield 1 to 2M more clients being served.

Professional management of local initiative funds

128 districts

Questions

Had to do work that didn't go back into Mifos - like reporting.

Reporting done on PHP to get data

Questions/challenges is to now be much more in touch with community.

Natu is very interested in Mifos X work

Action: set up call with Natu. Had to choose language that was easiest for implementation from their end.

For later implementations did

API for integration into other systems - how you approached that.

E-banking integration was based on audi bank plugin and then did separate plug-in.

Semba: working pretty well - in process of upgrading a few things here and there.

Lassaad: how is accounting integration functioning?

Accounting is always a major challenge. Did integration through specific queries through Pastel.

Still challenged but anticipating more integration.

CloudFoundry Integration Demo

CloudFoundry - platform allows you to deploy applications in the cloud - then can be accessible in web browser

Advantages

Easy to deploy an application - don't have to modify anything in the code.

Can deploy application from different machines

Don't need a separate run-time environment or jetty - just upload war file and access in web browser.

How to Do It:

Sign up account on cloud foundry website

Account is activated in about 2 days.

Download mifos cloudfoundry war file - special version optimized for running on cloudfoundry or tomcat 6

Can grab this from sourceforge -->

Run several commands in windows console (tutorial on cloud foundry page)

Target cloud foundry in the cloud.

Log in to cloud foundry using the credentials

Specify settings like memory and other options

War will be uploaded and then can access in web browser.

Questions:

Miguel: What about properties files - how are these configured when doing this

What about database settings?

Configuration settings - would be hard to set up -

Miguel: Currently using VPS for most applications - this would be more cost-effective - would like to organize a chat.

Patrick: what about chart of accounts?

Where do we upload this in? --> Lukasz: could be possible to reference these files.

Miguel: for different clients - do we need one cloudfoundry or several?

Keith: right now Mifos as its designed it's not suitable for multi-tenancy.

Action: to document how this configuration and uploading of chart of accounts is done.

Nayan to do a demo on AWS AMI and how to roll those out.