Open Atrium

Jacob Allred
#free-stuff#reviews#web-dev

I’ve recently discovered Open Atrium. I love it!

Built on Drupal, this “intranet in a box” is the perfect solution for my company.

These are the things I love about it:

  1. Works without a lot of configuration, but is still highly configurable in case you need it to do something special.
  2. Allows you to define groups and limit access to each group. This means I can have a “The Awkward Turtle” group and only allow myself and my wife (we’re the only ones working on it) to even know the group exists, and I can also have a “Creative Barcodes” group and allow myself, my wife, and our graphic designer Anthony to see it.
  3. Gives you a dashboard with all of the pertinent information from all of the groups that you are a member of. You also have a group dashboard that only shows you the important information for that specific group.
  4. You can, on a group-by-group basis, enable several awesome included features:
    1. A blog
    2. A notebook (sort of like a wiki)
    3. A calendar (even supports iCal)
    4. A case tracker (for keeping track of feature requests and bugs)
    5. A shoutbox (good for microblogging)
  5. It looks great and is very easy for an end-user (or an admin) to figure it out.

There are, however, a few things I’m not terribly excited about:

  1. Documentation is a bit lacking, but that isn’t unexpected for beta software.
  2. Doesn’t work on PHP 5.3. I had to setup Apache to run both 5.3 and 5.2 to get it working. This wasn’t really surprising though, as a lot of Drupal stuff has problems with PHP 5.3.

Is it perfect? Not yet, but I think someday soon it will be.

For an example Open Atrium site, check out their own community pages.