Future of CiviCRM & Mobile

Published
2015-05-04 09:18
Written by

As we are living in an increasingly mobile-focused world, how can CiviCRM can be integrated with mobile and leverage features native to mobile? During the recent CiviCRM Sprint in Colorado, a group of us got together to discuss what currently exists, what's in the works and new features that would be helpful to include in the future. 

We started off by discussing CiviMobile, a web app developed with the jQuery Mobile framework by Peter McAndrew in December 2011.  The web app focuses on three main areas: Events, Contacts and Surveys. Click here to see some screenshots included in a previous blog post. CiviMobile currently works with CiviCRM 4.3, but the core team is working on the new release that will work with CiviCRM 4.6.

Here's the feedback and requirements we worked on as a result of the discussion we had during the sprint. You can share what you are working on and what you would like to be included in the future on the Wiki page. There is also a section for CiviMobile in the Forums, and you can share your question in Stack Exchange

The purpose of this wiki page is to gather use cases and requirements for improvements to CiviMobile.  Please take a look at what the current features available in CiviMobile, share use cases for how you would like to use CiviMobile, and share details for specific requirements. You can also include examples of implementations in other CRM tools to help us think about different use case scenarios, good ideas to consider and things to avoid. 

Feedback

Parvez Saleh, Veda Consulting
Veda Consulting is currently developing native mobile apps to allow charities to engage with their constituents. These apps will allow push notifications to be sent to the constituents as well as allowing them to register onto events. We’ll be sharing our experience and customer feedback at CiviCon London 2015.

Guy Iaccarino, Greenleaf Advancement
Our clients would like to be able to easily access their CiviCRM data using a mobile app. For example, it would be helpful to be able look up people in CiviCRM on your phone before meeting with them, so you have a better context how the person is engaging with your organization.

Lisa Taliano, National Urban League
We are interested in seeing how to use CiviCRM on mobile for case management.  The case manager would like to schedule activities and send notification to their clients,  in return they would like to receive data and attachments from them, such as verification of attendance or enrollment eligibility. In addition, we'd like clients to be able to see all of their scheduled activity and files on a simple dashboard.
 
Jeremy Proffitt, Mobius New Media
We are currently deploying a number of conference and event management distributions using CiviCRM and Joomla. It would be very useful for our clients to be able to handle creation and management of events and their participants - from registration to check-in, along with activity creation and participation. We're looking at porting previous template and API workflows into CiviMobile.

Requirements

Joe Murray, JMA Consulting
1. Find contacts and map them to default native mapping software so that user can see where they are relative to each other, then click on one to get route from present location and go into navigate mode.
2. Find contact, view all activities including notes in preparation for meeting with them.
3. Find contact, create an activity including standard fields and automatically attach photos from native camera app to the activity before saving.
4. Specify search and result fields on profile configured for searching for the above use cases.
--
At Ginkgo Street Labs, we are developing cross-platform mobile apps for nonprofits, but haven't created a mobile app that works with CiviCRM yet. This is an exciting new frontier for the CiviCRM community. We look forward to collaoborating with others in the community around CiviCRM-mobile integration.

Share your thoughts on the future of CiviCRM & Mobile by commenting below or adding your ideas to the wiki

Filed under

Comments

Hi,

As you know, we have a Google summer of code project to work on an android app. Definitely something to benefit from and collaborate. Roshani, still time to join as co-mentor?

Anonymous (not verified)
2015-07-18 - 09:17

How /where/when can I and other people contribute to the development of either a web app or preferably native mobile apps?

I think that CiviCRM is way behind of the current mobile generation. 

Thanks for your feedback Yuri. We look forward to collaborating with you and others in the community around mobile.  

Anonymous (not verified)
2015-09-18 - 00:00

Could you tell where exactly (URL?!) we can find "around mobile" ?! I investigated two hours by now - have found civisync - but am not sure whether this is what you mean..
Thanks, Sebastian

There's a 'partially built' CiviMobile extension listed on the extensions directory: https://civicrm.org/extensions/civimobile

Other than that, you might want to check in with folks at Ginkgo Street Labs as to whether they know about other intiatives

I don't know what the current state is, but there's been some activity after the release of CiviCRM 4.6 on CiviMobile's GitHub repository. It looks like the last commit was in April.

https://github.com/webaccess/com.webaccessglobal.module.civimobile