Do we need offline?

Connectivity
Lebanon, Musoni Kenya and another: DSL ok in urban branch offices, difficult in rural. 3G alternative not always viable inside buildings. 2G better, but might not be sufficient.

Two topics: Remote Branches <-> Headoffice vs. Smartphones/Tablets.

How do you work currently? Branches fallback to manual tracking, and when connectivity comes back they type everything in. If no connectivity then either just do it the next day, or (depending on the policy), the branch manager has to arrange to go to another branch where there is connectivity to have all the paperwork typed in there. Mobile/dial up typically not an option because so slow that he'd rather drive 1h. This depends on country, in others they have good experience with using a 3G dongle in branches to fallback to if the DSL goes down.

For tablet app, data connectivity would be an issue. Data Collections like deposits, and New Client application - although this depends, someone from an African MFI said that in his the LO has to bring a client to a branch for sign-up, anyway. Every Org. has specific questionaire (home & business visit) - a tablet app would have to support capturing questionaire responses in the field in offline.

Tablet App would not have to be a replacement of a complete Mifos UI in a branch. Synchronization from tablet should get loaded into the system, but all new or changed data should go into a kind of Unapproved state, for review in the branch. They wouldn't like a tablet app from the field to directly update the live data.

There is security concerns when replicating data to a device for offline access. We would want minimal as needed data to be on the tablet. The choice of what gets replicated may be automatic, as the system would know which clients a LO visits on a given day.

A branch manager, who has good internet connectivity, should be able to e.g approve loans from a smartphone or his tablet. This could simply be achieved by making sure that the main UI is using responsive design etc. and is useable from mobiles. This may not need offline capability.

Other use cases:
* GPS and Maps of where meetings are
* Assessment of potential customers, for individual lending. An Excel-like questionaire with calculations would be useful?
* Training material for financial education

Security? Musoni uses VPN on old system, and just HTTPS for new Mifos X.