Announcing the Margaret H Release

Following the transition of Mifos from the Grameen Foundation, we’re pleased to announce the first major release of Mifos fully supported by community members.  This release will be code-named Margaret H in recognition of Margaret Matinde, one of the many women that Nuru Kenya has been empowering to rise up from extreme poverty.

Margaret Matinde has been a Nuru client for three years. Throughout this time, Nuru gave her the ability to save and the opportunity to take out a loan to start a successful restaurant business. Now instead of struggling to provide for her children, she can send them to school and focus on building their future. For the past year and a half, Nuru has been using Mifos to administer loans and savings accounts to clients like Margaret through their Community Economic Development program.  Rebecca Herrington and her team have been an active and engaged community member throughout the transition.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQ6OatDDtag]

Margaret H is scheduled to ship on March 15, 2012. Led by Jakub and his team at SolDevelo, the release contains improvements across all core areas of the product. SolDevelo has led the development of a number of features independently and worked closely with fellow community members to address some of the critical product needs that our community has been voicing.

This release has been a true collaborative effort  – the community has come together, contributors new and old. On top of our new code repository on GitHub, SolDevelo has brought together contributions from past staff and volunteers like Udai Gupta and Michael Vorburger, current Specialists like Conflux Technologies, and new Specialists like FINA and Hugo Technologies.  Chetan Bekkinkeri from SunGard has been coordinating product management and helping to turn all your feedback into actionable functional requirements.  The community should be proud of the long list of contributors who are making Margaret H possible.

Margaret H – What’s Inside?

Core Functional Improvements include the support for automated late fees and penalties, making the GLIM (Group Lending with Individual Monitoring) module fully functional, new interest rate methods, more powerful tools for closing out each period, and mulitple user interface improvements.

Mifos will now be more accessible outside of the office. In addition to the Android smartphone client, SolDevelo has now built a mobile-optimized interface for Mifos so you can access your data from any mobile device in a user-friendly format.

As you push Mifos to new markets around the world, we’re localizing it along the way.  Thanks to Udai Gupta, Margaret H will now support multiple languages on a single instance with the ability to change your language from your browser on the fly. Kakhaber and his FINA team have been blazing through translations onTranslatewiki.net – they’re contributing both the Georgian and Lao translations for this release.

2012 Product Roadmap On its Way

The Community Product Management team has been processing through the backlog of feature requests to publish a plan for development this upcoming year and an architectural vision for the future.  Our next release is already shaping up to have some nice enhancements making both reporting and importing data into Mifos easier to perform.