Announcing the Samiha J Release

Our issue and feature planning is complete and we’re ready to announce our upcoming Mifos release targeted for shipping the first week of September.  This release will be code-named Samiha J. Samiha J will provide support for daily loan repayments, ability to bulk edit existing client data, import transactions via spreadsheet, a configurable chart of accounts, and additional REST APIs

Samiha is a borrower at Al Majmoua, one of our largest Mifos users serving more than 31,000 clients in Beirut, Lebanon.  Samiha has been a borrower since 2009, taking out loans to expand her 15-year Mouneh production (food preservation) business. By expanding her business, Samiha has drastically improved the quality of life for her family through these loans – funding her husband’s medical treatment, her daughter’s education, and serving her handicapped son’s needs.

George and the entire team at Al Majmoua have been one of the most active users in the community this year. Al Majmoua sponsored the development of a number of features that were shared with the community during the Margaret H release and are continually testing out our new releases and providing feedback. We’re honored to recognize one of their borrowers and how they have uplifted the life of her family.

Overall Product Roadmap and Strategy

For the two major remaining Mifos 2.0 releases in 2012, we’re aiming to close out any major gaps for supporting group lending and to smooth out and technical gaps that make implementation difficult.  These two releases will be the final releases containing active feature development for the Mifos 2.0 product.  This product will continue to be supported and maintained with bug fixes while all active feature development will take place on the new Mifos X platform. Mifos X will be a true platform providing greater support for all microfinance methodologies – it will be more lightweight, more extensible, and fully multi-tenant. It will cost less and be quicker to implement, host, and to extend – making our technology more widely accessible.

What’s Inside Samiha J

Fitting within this theme of closing functional gaps and smoothing out technical implementation, Samiha J has a good number of front and back-end improvements beyond a wide number of bug fixes.  To better fully support group lending, Samiha J will allow for daily loan repayments (daily savings interest posting will ship in the Marie K ) release.  To ease getting data in to Mifos, the ability to bulk edit existing clients and bulk import loans and savings transactions will be provided. The REST APIs for creating a client and creating loans and savings account will also be delivered. To advance the Mifos-ACC module, we will also make the chart of accounts configurable so it can be more flexible and fluid.  A full list of issues being worked on can be found on the release notes page.