Given that there's an upcoming code sprint in the UK where rumor has it there will be some work done to improve CiviCase, I thought I would put my wishlist out there and get the community's response.  I'm a pretty frequent and detailed user of CiviCase, and although the majority of our actual service delivery is interactive, either on the phone or in person, we send and receive a lot of email correspondence, some of which ends up being relevant to one or more cases.  So one category of improvements I'd like to see involve the email processor and its functions.

I wish the email processor would:

• allow me to select multiple activities at once to be filed on a case (perhaps with a checkbox interface similar to what appears in a contact search);
• allow me to delete activities that have been attached automatically to a contact, sometimes by mistake;
• allow me to see a reference in a user's activity stream after an activity has been filed on a case: something like "activity filed on case 25098";
• allow me to configure an organization contact with an email domain, so that all emails from that domain are filed on that organization's contact, rather than on individual contact records. There are some organizations with which we have very loose associations, and we don't want to bother maintaining individual contacts - we just want to see all of the email from that organization in a single stream.

One of our requirements for CiviCase was a higher degree of security than what is normally associated with a community website. Users reach our CiviCase implementation via https, which is great, but leaves open the whole password issue. Those of you who live in the corporate IT world will be familiar with the two-factor ID solutions that are available on the market, from RSA, CryptoCard, and maybe others. We decided to use one of these solutions so that our users would always be given a "fresh" password for each login.

I was doing some other reading this week, and stumbled across this definition of case management:

The National Association of Social Workers Standards for Social Work Case Management (1995)defines case management as

… a method of providing services whereby the [professional] assesses
the needs of the client and the client's family … and arranges,
coordinates, monitors, evaluates, and advocates for a package of
multiple services to meet the specific client's complex needs. These
standards also emphasize interventions at micro-, mezzo- and

As I've said elsewhere, it's been a real pleasure working closely with the CiviCRM team on the CiviCase project. The work we're doing is exciting, and has at least a hope of offering some efficiency to the large number of service providers whose work is organized into "cases", however that term is locally defined.

Here's a description I first wrote a few months ago when I was tossing back and forth ideas to build this kind of system in a different context. I've adapted it a bit to suit the current terminology. I originally posted it in the forum, which is where I'd invite you to put your comments.

A case management system is basically a big table of activities, which come from various sources. The sources might include:

• humans entering them into a web form