CiviCase

Howdy y’all

Welcome to post 2 of our in depth look at the new CiviCase extension! 

Aloha, everyone! As you all know, CiviCRM is shipped with a lot of useful report templates for each CiviCRM entities. You can use these templates to create difference report instances to interrogate your data.

CiviCoop have produced a wonderful extension, Documenten, which provides some great new features for adding attachments to Case Activities and storing them in a user-friendly way (a Documents tab on the Contact record), as well as the ability to update files with newer versions of the file. Some of the extensions features were only functioning when Cases and Activities were being created through the Webform CiviCRM feature.

MEAA are a union organisation in Australia with a very wide brief including both union activism and membership drives, as well as legal services to its members.

They use Cases extensively and we were keen to deliver some improvements to 'inbound email' so that they could include the case id in the subject, and have the email added to the relevant case.

With a clear roadmap towards improved CiviCRM experience, Agiliway team keeps aligning CiviCRM software capabilities with an end-user working environment. The newly released CiviCalendar extension is our most recent solution and an absolutely necessary stop. From now on CiviCRM users can easily visualize their daily, weekly and monthly activities within CiviCRM.

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A little background.

Established in 1972, we are a non-profit human services organization that serves many diverse populations in the Greater Pittsburgh area.

A large part of our focus is on homeless services, but we also do some mental and physical health programming, early childhood development, community integration and host a large food pantry near the University of Pittsburgh campus. 

CiviCase is a case-management system for tracking multistep interactions with constituents -- such as social support services, constituent services, and applications for employment. The CiviCase toolset enables organizations to provide a more consistent quality-of-service to their constituents by setting out a base timeline for the services to provide to each constituent. This is a powerful tool that can be adapted to a variety of organizations and requirements.

If you don't know about the email processor, briefly it's a way to file emails into CiviCRM as activities, and less briefly, see http://book.civicrm.org/user/current/advanced-configuration/email-system-configuration (about half way down).

I've been doing some fiddling with drag and drop and, in particular for CiviCase, it would simplify the process of getting the emails into CiviCRM. It also removes the need, if you're using the IMAP method, for storing everyone's individual email passwords in the CiviCRM admin page settings. And it would work with attachments.

(This post is a follow-up to previous discussions about developing recruitment functionality for CiviHR. More information can be found in the first, second, and third blog posts well as the requirements wiki.)

CiviCase is generally described as "a container for activities". As a container, it's well-suited to two scenarios:

We learned that there was a need to develop a CiviCRM local community in Mexico, based on enlarging the demand (Civil Society Organizations that valued the system could pay for and use CiviCRM), the offer (IT providers and web-designers that could offer their knowledge, skills and services to these organizations at reasonable prices) and the links to the international CiviCRM community (understanding the steps towards expanding the outreach of the software and make its installation and usage more friendly in IT-scare contexts).

We want to propose a Make It Happen for a CiviCase configuration UI (see forum post http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,25791.15.html).

The current road to setting up a new Case Type involves creating an XML file, setting up Activity Types and Relationship Types, and making sure they are all spelled correctly and consistently throughout the process. Although it works fine it is quite cumbersome. It would be nicer to have a User Interface to deal with it.

Just created a quick ERD for CiviCase, and shared it on this page http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC42/CiviCRM+ERD+3.3.

It is version 3.3, so not the latest and greatest. But I am sure I will have to check the same ERD for version 4 at a near point in the future and update the ERD too. And I do not think there are major differences in the data model......

I have also attached the ERD to this blog post.