UK users and developers of CiviCRM got together at the Create Centre in Bristol. We had a good mix of current and potential users and developers from a wide range of organisations and had a wide ranging discussion about lots of different aspects of CiviCRM use, with particular emphasis on the UK.
The original draft of these notes is based on Dave Moreton's and Michael's recollections. Given that we are only human, there are lots of gaps and opportunites to make these notes more representative of your views. Also, feel free to add things that you wish you had said at the time.
Attendees
Oliver Gibson, North West ICT champion based at GMCVO, a consortia of infrastructure organisations in the Manchester Area. Has investigated CiviCRM along with a number of other commercial products. Found Civi to be better than commercial offerings
Paul Matthews, works at University of the West of England (UWE) on web design course for students of information systems, partnering students with local voluntary organisations. Wants to find out about CiviCRM functionality.
Ken Elkes, Works at Federation of City Farms - a small membership charity with fund-raising needs. Not a techie. Wants to find out about suitability of CiviCRM
Nick Plant, Academic based at UWE. Works on community project similar to Paul Matthews (above). Also works at small charity as trustee / we officer. Interested in CiviCRM as solution for both interests.
RogerCO, From Green Party South West. Using CiviCRM with Joomla for fund-raising and mobilising resources. Commitment to Joomla side of things
Dave Jenkins, Circle Interactive. Works on a lot of projects involving CiviCRM and Drupal
Dave Moreton, Circle Interactive. Works at Circle Interactive. Commercial web development company which uses a lot of open source. Likes the way that CiviCRM does an enormous amount 'out of the box'.
Diane, also from Federation of City Farms. Interested in finding out more about how CiviCRM could be useful to their organisation.
Sean Kenny, VOSCUR. Has been using CiviCRM 1.8 for 2 years at VOSCUR. Has also installed CiviCRM at 5 other small community organisations in Bristol area.
Bails, Works at Bristol Wireless. Organisation supplying Bristol with free wireless internet, with commitment to using open source software
Michael McAndrew, Works for Third Sector Design. Developed CRM with similar functionality 2 years ago for a couple of organisations. Now migrating to CiviCRM. Involved in project to create a CiviCRM installation for CVS organisations in partnership with Voluntary Action Westminster. Keen to see more collaboration between UK developers and wider uptake in UK voluntary sector.
What we talked about...
CiviCRM at VOSCUR
Sean gave a presentation on CiviCRM at VOSCUR and fielded many questions on how they are using it, how to perform certain tasks, etc.
Oliver pointed out that the organisation does need to push members to login and update their members.
Customising interface
A couple of people asked about restricting views of the data based on permissions. Being able to offer different views for different types of users would increase usability as the interface would be simpler. RogerCO achieves this by exposes a lot of functionality through profiles.
Dave Jenkins pointed out that the best way of doing this is to use profiles.
Oliver suggested that in use by a large organisation, the system is likely to be customised in various ways, such as profiles, custom fields, and maybe some modifications to the code that they should have a support organisation rather than rely on an accidental techie who may move on.
US focus
Michael asked if people think Civi is US-centric. People said not really. Roger remarked that it has English counties out of the box. Oliver has removed some American content from his install but generally this was not seen as too much of a problem.
Roger pointed out that it's easy enough to hide fields through profiles
Performance
Paul asked about performance (i.e. are people using the system held up by page load times). Dave Jenkins reported that with Voscur's implementation of 1.8, which has 10 times the recommended number of custom fields (!) and is being served from a 3 year old machine, it has generally fared quite well except when the occasional badly-configured robot has ripped through the public directory searches. Sean said that they had actually put down occasional delays to general internet slowness. With the increased efficiencies in 2.x even robot abuse should become less of a problem. The site will also be moving to more modern hardware at the same time so we will report back on that at the next meeting.
Functionality that would benefit UK audience - reporting
Michael asked the group what functionality would benefit a UK audience. Lobo had emailed Michael to say that the core development team is keen to support the needs of projects in the UK
Michael suggested that the UK funding environment, which places great emphasis on monitoring, is one way in which the UK environment is different to the US.
Nick Plant concurred that monitoring is a key issue for nearly all UK organisations, and thus a selling point for any CRM in the UK. He also suggested that CiviCRM at event at circuit riders conference in Feb would also be a good arena for discussion of UK interests.
Dave Moreton reminded people that quite a bit of information can be brought out through advanced searches and the search builder facility. Sean added that search builder is sufficient for most the reports that VOSCUR need, even if sometimes the process is a bit clunky. One limitation is that these only give a snapshot of now so it's not possible to see how many organisations of type X based in ward or city Y had employees tagged as Z in the first quarter of last year compared with the first quarter of this year.
Oliver said that after evaluation, CiviCRM's case management functionality was not currently sufficient for his consortia's needs. Concerns about case management and reporting means Oliver is on the brink of choosing another (proprietary) system for a couple of large infrastructure organisations.
Dave Jenkins pointed out that BIRT offers more flexible reporting but is not easy for a non-technical user to set up or use (although they would be able to use it to retrieve data once some reports have been set up though). One issue with BIRT is that it is Java based and so requires some additional installation and skills to get it working.
Oliver remarked that at least if you're using CiviCRM, you're collecting the data for reports to be generated at some point, which may not be the case for some organisations with an old Access contacts database.
Sean showed the group uservoice.com and showed people how to vote for features, for example improving change logging as a feature at http://civicrm.uservoice.com/
Outlook integration
Someone asked about attaching files to emails or integrating with an email client such as Outlook. If only we'd been reading lobo's blog on the Sunday before this meeting, we'd have seen this... http://civicrm.org/node/406\\
