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:
- Works without a lot of configuration, but is still highly configurable in case you need it to do something special.
- 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.
- 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.
- You can, on a group-by-group basis, enable several awesome included features:
- A blog
- A notebook (sort of like a wiki)
- A calendar (even supports iCal)
- A case tracker (for keeping track of feature requests and bugs)
- A shoutbox (good for microblogging)
- 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:
- Documentation is a bit lacking, but that isn’t unexpected for beta software.
- 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.