Sean Reiser

As some of you know my "love affair" with Drupal started a few year ago when I was leading a development team and realized we needed a better way of communicating. Of course there was no budget for developing or purchasing a tool, and after some looking around I found Drupal, and built a small site for my team to track bugs and share information as a skunkworks project. Since then I've repeated that experiment in a number of different firms. Recently, I've begun building a similar site for myself to help manage myself, any outside contractors I have and my clients. I know basecamp is out there, but wanted something I could more easily control, backup and enhance as needed. It looks like I'm not going to be building something afterall.

Yesterday development seed, a major Drupal development show released a beta version of Open Atrium, an opensource intranet / project management system. I've spent a few hours kicking the tires, not enough for a full opinion.

Atrium's install is implemented as a Drupal 6 Installation Profile and as such it's as easy / difficult to install as Drupal 6. I've never had issues installing Drupal 6 and have always found it's install to be quite simple but I know others have found it to be a barrier to entry.

The default themes have a "basecamp" style web 2.0 look and feel, communicating a lot of information at times but still doing it simply and easy on the eyes. There are simplified admin menus which are approachable to both developers and admins, but should make adminning by non-drupalists easy. Of course there's the possibility for you to create a theme that fits your organization's look and feel.

Functional groups can be setup inside the software. As you might suspect the this is handled via Drupal's Organic groups.

Functionally the system gives you access to Blogs, Cases (issue tracking), Documents, a Calendar a Dashboard and a "Shout Box". Any combination of these can live in any group. Simply speaking The Shout Box is a group level short messaging system (think Twitter on a group level). The Dashboard shows activity in all the groups your active in. I think Blogs, Cases Documents (which are Drupal Book Pages) and the Calendar are rather self explanatorily.

At the end of the day this is an excellent drupal systems with all the OG, Views, CCK, and spaces goodness you'd expect. I suspect it will fit at least 90% of the needs of an organization who needs an intranet or ticket tracking package. As it's written in Drupal you can modify it to your hearts content with existing or custom modules. Atrium provides hooks into their tools so you can add features which integrate seamlessly with the atrium's. Full details on on their site

As an aside if you're a programmer learning Drupal or just looking for some new tricks, you should look at the source code of their custom modules, it's well written and rather educational. I suspect in the coming weeks I'll be implementing this for my own needs.