We announced Margaret H to you last week and it's now ready for download and use in production. We're excited about this release - not only is it the first major release led independently by SolDevelo and the community, it's packed with new features inside and outside the product. It is the teamwork of our community that produces powerful software that is helping Mifos users like Nuru serve more women like Margaret Matinde. 

We've been hearing for a while now about some must-have features and we are delivering those to you in this release and upcoming versions of the product  Margaret H includes automated late penalties, functional enhancements to GLIM, a plug-in tool for importing clients via spreadsheet, greater ease in adjusting previous transactions, and better control over end of period processing.

Accessibility of Mifos is key. In Margaret H we made great strides in bringing you enterprise-level technology deployable in the easiest means possible. Margaret H includes an easily deployable WAR for CloudFoundry so you can get running in the cloud without delay. On the mobile front, in addition to the Mifos Android Smartphone Client developed by SolDevelo, Mifos is now accessible from any phone via a mobile-optimized user interface.  Now you can view your information in Mifos when you're far beyond the office - whether it be from a smartphone or a simple feature phone with a java browser.  More great improvements are in store with continued work on an installer package, quicker rollouts in the Amazon EC2 cloud, and simplification of Mifos in Linux webhost environments. 

Margaret H also makes Mifos more widely available to our global audiences.  FINA contributed the Lao and Georgian translations to this release. Mifos is now fully translated into 9 additional languages! Best of all, you can now dynamically change which language Mifos is in directly from your browser. Thanks to the user-based locale work done by Udai, you  can use Mifos in multiple langages on one single instance - whatever your user prefers.

Many community members made this release possible but please give Jakub Slawinski, Lukasz Chudy, and the rest of the SolDevelo team a special thank you for leading development of the release. Several features in this release were also sponsored and generously shared with the community by Al Majmoua

Download Mifos now and if you find any bugs, report them in our issue tracker on MifosForge.  You can also try it all out on our demo server too if you'd like. Mark your calendars - we'll be demoing all the new functionality at our next user meetup on Thursday March 29.

Mifos 2.3 - What You Get

Automated Late Penalties

With this feature for loan products you can define and automatically apply late penalties for overdue payments. You can configure this as a fixed fee or or calculated as a percentage of [Overdue Amount Due, Outstanding Loan Amount, Outstanding Principal, or Overdue Principal]. Late fees can be applied one-time or recur on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Special thanks to the nearly ten organizations that provided requirements for this feature, Chetan Bekkinkeri for consolidating these requirements into one massive but easy to follow functional spec, and SolDevelo for building it.  A brilliant example of the community coming together - we need to hear what you want and then we'll connect with the developers who can build it. 

Import Clients via Excel Plugin

Now you can import a list of clients and their entire data profile. Rather than enter each one manually you can now automatically import them via an Excel spreadsheet. This is a great tool to speed up entering a large set of new clients or during the initial data migration phase. Lukasz and SolDevelo helped to move on this feature that will be much appreciated by customers like Nuru and others wanting to save time getting their data in Mifos.

GLIM Enhancements

We've made the Group Loans with Individual Monitoring (GLIM) feature more powerful. Now you can create a group loan and view through the user interface each of the individual loan schedules for the recipients of the group loan. More enhancements to round out GLIM functionality are coming up.

Per-User Languages

Using Mifos in multiple countries? Staff in the field want to view records in French and Management at the head office want to use Mifos in English? Now with per-user locales this is possible. Directly from your browser you can change your preferred language on the fly.  Thanks to Udai Gupta for building out this cool and extremely useful feature. Check it out in action on the demo server. 

Lao and Georgian Translations

One of our newest community members in recent months has been FinA led by Kakhaber Kheladze based out of Georgia.  He and his team have been an invigorating force in the community, urging everyone on to make Mifos a stronger and better software.  He pushed his translation teams hard to the finish to wrap up their translations for Margaret H - thanks to FINA, we're proud to have Mifos available in two additional languages, Lao and Georgian.  Expect to see more from FINA as Kakhaber is leading up work on both accounting and offline data collection modules as well as a couple more localizations of Mifos.  Additional thanks to Siebrand and Niklas, the admins at Translatewiki.net for pushing all our commits through and Michal Dudzinski for closing out on some of the much-needed localization clean-up work. 

Mifos in Lao

Mifos in Georgian

Mobile-Optimized Interface

Mifos 2.3 is integrated with the Spring Mobile Framework.  Mifos now automatically detects what type of device you are logging into from and will dynamically display the proper UI. If you're on a smartphone or feature phone, it'll now display the new mobile-optimized pages. You can check this out on the demo server by clicking the "Switch site type" logo at the top of the page. 

Cloud Foundry Integration

Mifos 2.3 ships with a WAR file that you can easily deploy in CloudFoundry. With this integration, you don't have to worry about setting up the infrastructure to power Mifos - you can run Mifos in VMWare's Cloud Service or any Cloud provider like Amazon, Rackspace, etc. 

Adjusting Individual Historical Transactions

We know it's been a headache to adjust past transactions.  To adjust payments made a few installments back, you had to adjust the entire sequence of payments, manually adjusting each individual payment leading up ot it. Now you can adjust previous payments individually with the click of a button. This feature was sponsored by Al Majmoua in Lebanon, part of a set of features they contracted with SolDevelo to build and were generous enough to share back with fellow community members. 

Month End Closing

This is another one of Al Majmoua's sponsored features. This allows you to specify a cut-off date in Mifos for month-end closing and accounting processing. No transactions will be permitted prior to this date allowing you to lock your data in place while you reconcile Mifos with your accounting system.

Al Majmoua also sponsored the following new features which were built by SolDevelo:

• Support for backdating Repay Loan up until last repayment date
• Ability to set transaction date when writing off/repaying loan
• Facility for recording and clearing out overpayments on loans

Mifos also included some other features and usability optimizations including:

• Added support for flat interest method for variable installment loans
• Ability to view and input thousands separator for numerical fields
• Display full values in the collection sheet for large currency amounts
• Executable WAR file developed by Michael Vorburger as the precursor to a standalone installer package. 

Many thanks to the SolDevelo team, Chetan for his product management, and all the various community members who made this release possible. Our user manual will soon be updated with how to use all this new functionality. Our community is hard at work on the next release. We'll be ready to pull the covers off the 2012 product roadmap to show you what's in store so stay tuned.