This is the homepage of our (EE-atWork) project installing CiviCRM at De Goede Woning, a Dutch social housing corporation. I will mainly use this page to keep track of all the localization tasks, all the customizations I need to develop and all the links to other systems I am going to be involved in. I will also post all code I create on this page.

Erik Hommel

The project

De Goede Woning did a prototype with CiviCRM in 2009 and decided to start implementing CiviCRM as their main CRM. The dream they eventually want to aim for is:

To be able to access all relevant information about an individual indepent of where we are, and the level of information is determined by the context we are in

• De Goede Woning also sells houses. Currently all the data around that process is contained in separate Excel sheets. We want to import all that data in CiviCRM and streamline the process in CiviCRM to be able to:
  • sell more houses
  • sell quicker
  • have a better match between customer and product to make the processe more effective

• De Goede Woning wants to hold social information about relevant families in CiviCRM. This will range from members of the family, what other social parties might be involved, which one of our social partners offer what service in a specific area to relevant information about the contacts we and our social partners have. At the moment most of this information is either in people's heads or in individual applications. With sharing this information we want to:
  • have less escalations of problems and less 'mistakes' (reintroducing a problem in an area because we have no records of the individual and we upset a whole community)
  • better chance to act in a pro-active rather than reactive way
  • possibility to create case specific team across departments
  • improve the general quality of living in our areas ( the Dutch term is 'leefbaarheid', litterally livibility?)

• The customer service department use CiviCRM to access customer information with the desired effects:
  • 80% of questions are anwered at the first level of entry of the customer
    • less internal referal traffic
    • more customers leave the building with a satisfactory feeling

At this point in time we are creating the project plan to achieve above goals. The management team will decide to go ahead with the first stage based on this plan. We expect this to take place in March 2010.

Localization tasks

Some of the localization things we need to do are generic on a Dutch level, some of the tasks will be generic for housing corporations and some will be specific for De Goede Woning. Right now I can think of the following points (but there will be much more to come I am sure):

Generic Dutch

Obvioulsy we will do all the localization in the admin menu, like changing the date and address formats, local currencies etc.

Complete translation

Remove states

The usage of states or provinces in addresses is not common in The Netherlands, that will need to be removed.

Remove individual suffixes

Individual suffixes do exists in The Netherlands, but are such an exception that we will get rid of it. To do that, I will change the template.

Generic housing corporation

Add marital status and 'burgerservicenummer' for individual

Add marital status and burgerservicenummer (Dutch unique ID for every individual) as specific data and include them in several templates

Remove nickname for individual, household and organization

We will use first name to hold either the first name, or the initials of the individual. There is no requirement to have nicknames recorded.

Remove external id for individual, household, and organization

There is no requirement for the data field external id. We might change the caption to 'burgerservicenummer' and use it to hold the individual unique national id.

Remove source for individual, household and organization

We can not think of a situation where we would use the field 'source' (yet), so we will remove it from the template.

Use SIC code for Kamer van Koophandel for organizations

Housing corporations in The Netherlands will have to hold the 'Kamer van Koophandel" id of some of the organizations (suppliers mainly). We will use the SIC code for that information.

Remove legal name for organization

We'll remove the legal name from the template.

Link to household immediately

Figure out what needs to be done to make sure that once an individual is created, the possibility to link to the correct household is available in a way that seems logical to the user

Specific De Goede Woning

Customization tasks

Linking to other applications

Link to First

In this project we will need to link to 2 other applications. One is the Oracle application First Housing as adapted and supported by NCCW. De Goede Woning currently use this as their main transaction system and it holds all data about propery, rental payments and that sort of stuff. We need to make sure we have a link to load data from First into CiviCRM, surely regularly and perhaps real time. Ideally we also have a link back so that data edited in CiviCRM also lands in First.

Finally we would like a way to get to a speficic spot in First from CiviCRM. So that for instance we can show the current balance of a household in CiviCRM, with a button next to it that leads to the specific screen in First with all the details.

We had a first meeting with the supplier and all our wishes are possible. I have a more detailed meeting scheduled for next week, when I will look at the possibilities in detail with a consultant from the supplier.

Link to eWorX

In a system called eWorX supplied by Square, De Goede Woning holds their digital archive with letters, documents etc. Obviously it would be great to have a button in CiviCRM that leads straight to the saved documents for that person. One challenge is going to be that I expect that currently eWorX is organised around property (address) rather than persons. First meeting with the supplier is scheduled for 26 February.

We had the first meeting, and I have some general information about the link they normally use. The supplier has created an additional component for interfacing, called eWorXopen.dll. This object needs to be referenced, and the XML messages can be used to perform certain actions. It looks pretty nice, but I have to figure out now how to process this kind of stuff. And ofcourse the DLL will not be on the same server as CiviCRM, as it needs a Windows server. I was thinking about using JS to deal with the client stuff, but that is depending on settings on the local browser and not very secure....to put it mildly. So I will post the issue on the forum and see if someone has any suggestions. I would imagine they will, my trust in the guys and girls here is massive

My thoughts Planning, issues and other stuff

I have attached my first concept planning for the project, and also the concept Business Case.