De Goede Woning is the first Dutch housing corporation to start using CiviCRM, and they are in the middle of their implementation process, expecting to go live in March 2011. One of their main loves in CiviCRM is the functionality of CiviCase, which they will use quite extensively for the following processes:
For our project at De Goede Woning we have been developing a data synchronization process between CiviCRM and their main transaction system in Oracle (comparable with an ERP). Some data for a contact (first name, middle name, last name, gender and birth date), phones, emails and addresses will be common between the two, so a change, create or delete in CiviCRM will have to be synchronized with the main transaction system and vice versa.
Today is the last day of the Bristol code sprint, which was a great experience! Lots done, climbed the Cheddar Gorge and tasted Kurundś famous lamb.... I will also always remember it for finding out I was part of the API team :-)
On a serious level, it is a good idea to have a team of people that take care of the API's. And taking care I think involves:
A couple of blog entries back (http://civicrm.org/blogs/mbriney/contacts-erd-v31 to be precise) Matt Briney was kind enough to share the contacts ERD with us! I promised to put some more on. The entire CiviCRM ERD is too big and complex to be useful in this format, but I have just created one for the location point of view.
Last Friday I we had a BeNeLux CiviCRM meetup in Vianen, with 21 attendants from all three countries (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxemburg). Lobo was present too as he was in the neighborhood (Paris?) anyway.
It was a very inspiring sessions, that got off with a good introduction. We split up in different parallel sessions, where Lobo did a general introduction, Erik Brouwer did a session on localization and I discussed my showcase of synchronizing data between CiviCRM and an Oracle application at De Goede Woning.
It's 19.50, I'm in the train from Brussels to home, on my way back from the CiviCRM developer camp. Erik Brouwer has just left the train, Eagles on the headphone and there's a multicolored display of non-identifiable ligths thru the window.....just another 90 minutes and I will be on the couch with a glass of red, cats purring on my lap and telling Floor all about the two days. So what was it like, this developer camp?
The Dutch housing corporation De Goede Woning did a prototype with CiviCRM in the last quearter of 2009. At the end of the prototype the project group wrote a recommendation to the Management Team:
take the basic decision to start using CiviCRM as their CRM make a project plan to start using CiviCRM in the sales and customer service part of the organisation to develop links to/from their main transaction system and their document management systemAfter a succesful conversion of data Transnational Institute (www.tni.org) will start using CiviCRM to manager their relations today.
We had an interesting example today at De Goede Woning. The case was brought up by one of the teammanagers that visited the project group this week to see where we were and what we were doing.
We started a project with a Dutch Housing Corporation called 'De Goede Woning' 2 months ago. They use CiviCRM to get a grip on their requirements towards a CRM-package. It is very possible that they will use CiviCRM after the project, but the objective is to understand what CRM means and what is needed for their specific situation. We use bog-standard CiviCRM (version 3.02 on Drupal 6.14 with the Dutch translation) with CiviCase. If you want to know more about the project, let me know! I love telling stories about our projects :-)
