Missing features in CiviCRM ...

A big stumbling block that people comment on when I show them CiviCRM as a potential system they could use for various tasks (contact databases, personnel databases, alumni databases, etc.) is that they couldn't use it because they can't control who can view or edit what at a detailed enough level. I know this is the kind of thing that's very difficult to do and still maintain good performance, but Blackbaud's eCRM system, for example, can do this pretty well. They want the ability to allow people to have no access, read-only access, or full access to both certain records and certain fields. Tricky...

Another big one is a full-blown campaign tool. Blackbaud's eCRM has a very nice campaign planning, progress, and reporting tool built in. It lets you create campaigns with goals and timelines, plan actions, contributions, etc. that will get you to your goals, and then as you execute things the actions and contributions that come in allow you to see where you're at relative to your plan. Very slick.

The biggest one of all is the platform Blackbaud has created for eCRM. I haven't coded against personally, but from what I've seen they have a pretty cool system for extending the CRM and adding new features, integrating with other systems, or altering the behavior of existing workflows. They're closed source, so they have to make sure the API they expose is pretty usable and robust. Since we're open source, we can get away with treating the whole codebase as an API to some extent. But there is a lot to be gained by having a clean, well-documented, stable API that people can hook into.

Random other interesting features I've seen or thought of while looking at the competition:

- RSS feeds for interesting reports (volunteers who need attention, new donor alert, etc.)
- Geographical search using Google Maps or some other visual map selection tool to find records based on visual map selections

Coming from more of a membership-based organization perspective, rather than charitable-donation perspective --

I see need for improvement with how some of the financial records are managed. For example:

1) Inability to generate invoices (or receipts) directly from the interface, either from an existing contribution record, or in such a way that a corresponding contribution record is created. Many of the orgs I work with still rely on invoicing by snail mail for membership renewals, etc., and it's difficult to effectively track those financial activities in CiviCRM. This is relevant for event registrations too -- we often accept registrations with the corresponding payment pending. The capability for that record keeping exists, but the subsequent invoicing and follow-up can't be done within CiviCRM.

2) Related -- In general, the idea of following up on delinquent/overdue payments is difficult to perform. For example, if I want to know accounts receivable for Workshop A, I have to create a custom search. I can look at all "pending" contribution records, but cannot easily perform the filter by event on that data. The contribution source field "may" be used for this purpose, but because that field is editable, and manually-created contribution records won't contain the same auto-filled data for that field, it is unreliable. It may be possible to run an advance search to retrieve a list of people fitting this criteria, but the data export contains none of the relevant financial/event fields, so it's virtually useless.

On the top of the pre-sales questions, I encounter :

- can we fetch the contacts from within outlook ?
- can we see the emails sent from outlook in civi ?
- can we send to a group from outlook ?

(replace outlook by any other mail client)

For the last one, we have a working solution with the integration with a mailing list manager, kind of hackish but does the trick

X+

On the Tomcat-based reporting thing: we are moving to a VPS hosting solution now and I have been told that being able to run Tomcat in addition to the usual LAMP stack required for the main website would require their top plan because of the amount of memory usage. Its just not feasible. Reports are a major thing for us, and I have to tackle it, so I'll share what I come up with. When we migrate to the VPS we'll be upgrading CiviCRM to the latest full release and I'm excited for the custom search stuff.

Mainly I'd like the ability to find both organizations AND individuals with certain relationships to those organizations, based on some search criteria about the organization. I am hoping custom searches will enable this. For example, we might want to find all orgs who have value X in custom field Y, and then send an email to the primary contacts. This comes up over and over.

Also, we recently had an election amongst our membership to elect a Board of Directors. Surely this must be a common thing. I facilitated it using an advanced poll component for Joomla and just modified it a little. I kind of hacked a way for the logged in user to be checked for a certain CiviCRM group membership in order to be allowed to vote. We had a complicated process for each org to identify a person with authority which we called a "certifier", and then the certifier could identify a voting representative. Only the people certified to vote on behalf of their org (added to the voters group in the CRM) were able to vote in the poll. Could this kind of activity be appropriately part of CiviCRM?