Posted under Open Atrium, Design & Build on February 1st, 2012 by Paul Barnes / No Comments

Open Atrium is an invaluable and intuitive way to collaborate online internally within your business, or externally between your clients and other companies.

The Product


From a product perspective, Open Atrium provides an intranet and extranet solution that includes collaboration features that are commonly needed by organisations seeking to build social knowledge sharing websites. 

Centered around the concept of using formal and informal groups to let users organize themselves for collaboration and then filter information up to universal features, Open Atrium makes the following tools available to each group:

• Blog feature provides a means for timely conversation, with support for threaded commenting, file attachments on both the post and comments, and granular email notifications to alert group members of new activity.
• Calendar feature lets each group to share information about meetings, project milestones, and more. Calendars support iCal sub- scription so that existing individual or team calendars from applica- tions like Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook can be seamlessly integrated with Open Atrium.
• Notebook feature lets users post static content, collaborate on documents, store and compare revisions, attach relevant files, and print interim or finalized versions.
• Shoutbox feature provides “microblogging” for users to share short updates, links, and other relevant information with others.
• Case tracker feature allows users to create, assign, and update tasks to to-do lists for projects, so that projects can be managed effectively online.
• Dashboard feature allows group and site administrators to control and arrange content display and make sure that teams are kept up to date with the latest important content appropriate for each group.
• Folders mwa Digital has developed it's own custom module to help you organise valuable company resource. Keep all your company literature, logos, guidelines, media and forms in one handy library. keep it simple or scale it up limitelessly.

	Dashboard: Your personal landing page to organise the tools that are most relevant to you.			Case Tracker: Create and assign cases to your team members and track it’s progress to completion.
	Blog: Start a discussion with team members or make important anouncements.			Folders: Upload/organise all your important company files. Jpegs, Word Docs, Excels, PDFs etc.
	Notebook: Dont hide all those valuable notes, links & references away. Share them with your team.			Calendar: Dont lose track of important milestones, deadlines & events with a project calendar.
	Themes: Customize the look and feel of Open Atrium with company branding & colours for each project.			Shout Box: Send a quick message to the project team using the elegantly simple, Shout Box!

Content on Open Atrium sites can be edited using a web interface using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG editor (Click here for a demo). Content can exist in various workflows and have customized fields, and sites can have users with various permission levels. Visual and other user interface customizations can be facilitated through a simple web interface. By paying careful attention to long term scalability and extensibility needs during development, the core Open Atrium product allows for significant customizations to be made within the user interface without changing any code. Such tools provide users with great flexibility to meet unique requirements for each new site built with the Open Atrium product.

The Platform


At the same time as Open Atrium is a product with turnkey features, it is also a platform for building custom knowledge management sites. The open source Open Atrium core package – based entirely on Drupal 6 – is fully extensible using common Drupal development best practices so that organizations can adjust the base Open Atrium features to meet unique business needs. For instance, Open Atrium users have integrated their sites with third party enterprise software like LDAP, document management, and CRM systems, created custom workflow features to match precise internal business processes, or created entirely new interfaces to meet unique branding and use case needs.

To help maximize return on investment for its users and cut down on long term costs of ownership from maintaining customizations, we pursued a few important priorities in the development of Open Atrium to ensure it would be a useful and reliable platform:

• Benefit from the open source community. We knew that using code and tools maintained by the wider Drupal community would minimize the effort required from developers to support customizations and would allow organizations to take advantage of future developments initiated by others without learning a new software development paradigm.
• Provide a clear upgrade path. We knew that as Open Atrium adoption grew, new features would inevitably be added to systems that have been customized by their users. Through a combination of application architecture and public documentation, we have made sure that new tools are as easy as possible for organizations to adopt into their custom systems.
• Allow for unique requirements and niche use cases. We knew that customizations for specific organizations would need to be accommodated in a way that would not degrade the core product. Techniques must exist for making truly custom changes to a given site.

Taking these considerations into mind, our team successfully developed the Open Atrium platform in a way that is letting us meet all of these goals. The core Open Atrium code provides a foundation for quick deployment, and relying on the Features development paradigm, developers are able to continue building new functionality and making customisations that can be accommodated within the product framework.

The end result of this “product and platform” approach is that Open Atrium users get the benefits of a carefully maintained and well supported core feature set, while at the same time maintain a level of freedom to customize when needed - something that proprietary software and restricted products rarely offer. For your organization, this flexibility will mean the ability to iterate on an established product base over time, and pursue the adoption or creation of new features when appropriate to meet the evolving needs of your users.

Read more about our Open Atrium Development Services or Contact mwa Digital to see how we can help tailor a solution that benefits your business immediately on tel: 0844 544 9553