{"id":1890,"date":"2009-07-15T12:09:32","date_gmt":"2009-07-15T10:09:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tokao.com\/?p=1890"},"modified":"2009-07-15T12:09:32","modified_gmt":"2009-07-15T10:09:32","slug":"drupal-mavens-unveil-open-atrium-an-intranet-in-a-box","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/2009\/07\/15\/drupal-mavens-unveil-open-atrium-an-intranet-in-a-box\/","title":{"rendered":"Drupal Mavens Unveil Open Atrium: An Intranet in a Box"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"openatrium-logo-thumb-150x50-6639\"Proprietary intranet vendors, be scared. Be very scared. Today,Development Seed<\/a>, the open source shop behind\u00a0DrupalCon<\/a> in DC and other endeavors, has released the public beta of\u00a0Open Atrium<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Open Atrium is a free and open source intranet built as a Drupal distribution, with some impressive functionality available out of the box. Not only is this a solid piece of software to begin with, but its makers are evangelizing what they think could be a transformative paradigm for extending Drupal’s capabilities.<\/p>\n

Development Seed has been around for about six years, and in that time they’ve built Drupal-based websites and intranets for the likes of the\u00a0UN<\/a> and the\u00a0World Bank<\/a>, among many others. Eventually they thought to themselves, why not put together this intranet as a separate distribution? Something extensible that could be deployed at lightning speed?<\/p>\n

Enter Open Atrium.<\/p>\n

In addition to being a well-constructed Drupal distro, the software is neatly packaged with an array of useful features for internal collaboration. There are blogs, wikis, a calendar, to-do lists, a ticketing system, and a microblogging tool called the Shoutbox. To aggregate the activity from these various parts, there’s a group dashboard.<\/p>\n

Oh, and did I mention that it\u00a0is multilingual<\/a> too? As a team that first met while working together in Peru, internationalism is a big goal for Atrium. To my knowledge, the only mature intranet to seriously support both English and other tongues is\u00a0ThoughtFarmer<\/a>. (Canadians and their French, eh?)<\/p>\n

\"screenshot-openatrium-thumb-550x403-6637\"<\/p>\n

In addition to the built-in functionality, developers can\u00a0create their own features<\/a> with relative ease. These features are not just new aspects to the software, but are actually a kind of meta-module, as described by Eric Gundersen of Development Seed in a phone conversation with ReadWriteWeb.<\/p>\n

Feature can be released on their own basis or served through a dedicated features server. The real goal behind them is to “make niche [use cases] work,” according to Gundersen. With virtually any features addition to Atrium able to be shared with others, Development Seed hopes that a healthy App Store-like ecosystem will develop that can “turn this in to an exciting business model” for themselves and other developers.<\/p>\n

Speaking with Gundersen, you can tell Development Seed has a serious expertise and passion for open source development, and it really shows in Open Atrium. It may not integrate with your legacy apps or be offered by a big enterprise vendor, but from where we’re sitting Open Atrium stacks up\u00a0very<\/em> well compared to any proprietary intranet software.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Proprietary intranet vendors, be scared. Be very scared. Today,Development Seed, the open source shop behind\u00a0DrupalCon in DC and other endeavors, has released the public beta of\u00a0Open Atrium. Open Atrium is a free and open source intranet built as a Drupal distribution, with some impressive functionality available out of the box. Not only is this a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[97,5,52,75],"class_list":["post-1890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-drupal","tag-news","tag-open-source","tag-readwriteweb"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1890"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1890\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}