Using Open Atrium in a small, Drupal-friendly, team

At Istos we have been using Open Atrium as our internal intranet / contact management system for one of our projects for about 3 months now. Open Atrium is a collaboration tool solution developed by Development Seed that comes with blogs, calendars, document management, shoutbox functionality, and a case tracker.

Our team is a small one (4-6 people) and we wanted something as tailormade as possible that fit our specific niche. We need to keep track of clients who buy advertising on a website we run (http://www.italymag.co.uk) and tasks that need to be performed with relation to those customers and their purchases (update banners, deal with images, text, support for users that have accounts, etc).

We used to use SugarCRM but found that an overkill for our needs. We also evaluated Salesforce, but again found that an overkill (and have a slight preference to self-hosted services rather than handing everything to a handful of big corporations). So we just had our own tricked out Drupal-installation that made extensive use of Views, CCK and related modules.

When Open Atrium came out we were immediately interested as it is a Drupal distribution so hopes were that we would be able to keep the parts we needed of Open Atrium and add, through familiar Drupal tools, the parts that were missing.

The great

Our expectations were mostly met. It took me the total sum of about 5-7 hours to go from vanilla Open Atrium to a setup that met about 80% of our needs - and a few more tweaks over the next couple of weeks had us completely satisfied.

The case tracking tool functionality is more than sufficient to co-ordinate the workings of a small team and all the terminology can be adjusted to your domain needs. Even the non-techies in the team found it easy to use and were happily uploading material or opening cases with techies going in, performing the tasks and then notifying everyone that the job is done and the client can be informed about it.

We just had to add to add some additional content types, taxonomies, build views specific to our needs and switch off some of the features (such as Blogs and Shoutbox) that we did not need.

What was particularly cool are some of the great UI effects such as being able to place views in blocks that are become buttons and open up with Ajax loveliness.

The not so great

Since we are coming from a background of heavy Drupal users one of the biggest difficulties was actually getting our heads round what Development Seed had done to poor Drupal! We were new to modules such as Features, Spaces and Context which, while helpful, do add even more concepts to an already complex system. Add to that modules such as Strongarm (which force variables to specific values) and you quickly find yourself in almost a Drupal parallel universe!

The main issue is that you would like to do things as you normally do in a Drupal installation but realise that it doesn't quite work that way with Open Atrium. It makes you jump through a couple of more hoops before you get that block where you want, or add a link where you need. The reason for this is quite clear - you just need to keep in mind that while this is Drupal is not quite the Drupal you think you know.

The recommendation

We can't really give a recommendation to non-Drupalites about how well Open Atrium will fit their needs. My feeling is that if you stick to the existing features you will be very pleased and the user experience is smooth (not to mention great looking).

For someone with Drupal experience, however, Open Atrium definitely offers a lot because it essentially does all the complicated stuff and you just need to go in and adjust them to your needs. Do spend some time to understand things likes Spaces, Context and Features as they are a big part of Open Atrium and, by the looks of things, will become a big part of Drupal's future as well. Don't expect to just go in with your existing Drupal knowledge and achieve everything - you need to understand this specific approach to setting up a Drupal solution.

Next week we will be setting up Open Atrium for a group of users without any Drupal background and reporting back on that experience.