Drupal Mavens Unveil Open Atrium: An Intranet in a Box

Written by Steven Walling / July 14, 2009 5:30 PM / 9 Comments

Proprietary intranet vendors, be scared. Be very scared. Today, Development Seed, the open source shop behind DrupalCon in DC and other endeavors, has released the public beta of Open 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 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.

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 UN and the World Bank, 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?

Enter Open Atrium.

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.

Oh, and did I mention that it is multilingual 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 ThoughtFarmer. (Canadians and their French, eh?)

In addition to the built-in functionality, developers can create their own features 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.

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.

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 very well compared to any proprietary intranet software.

Twitter tip via Chris Messina

Comments

Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteEnterprise posts

MindTouch pioneered Multilingual polyglot for Mozilla: http://www.viddler.com/explore/MindTouch/videos/16/

I don't think there is any content management system that does Multilingual polyglot as elegantly as MindTouch. The chrome of the app changes based on user preferences (takes precedence) and by site section. Pages of different languages can have relationships created. Search is smart by user preference and languages. You can even auto-translate (google translate). Watch the video (URL above).

Posted by: Aaron Roe Fulkerson | July 14, 2009 11:30 PM

Aaron, after watching the video, the multilingual support is first-rate. Thanks for pointing it out.

Posted by: Steven Walling | July 15, 2009 1:01 AM

This is good... Thanks for the info...

Posted by: Viking KARWUR | July 15, 2009 7:39 AM

I don't want to get into an argument with Aaron, because I've met him, and I'm pretty sure he could take me in hand-to-hand combat. HOWEVER... ThoughtFarmer absolutely does multilingual as elegantly as MindTouch, if not more elegantly. There are 5 aspects to it: autotranslate, localized UI, multilingual content management, request for professional translation, and language label overrides.

But at the end of the day, this article is about Open Atrium! Which looks like a fantastic new Open Source option for intranets. Nice looking web site and UI, and Drupal is a rock-solid core. Congrats to the guys at Development Seed. Nice find Steven.

Posted by: Chris McGrath | July 15, 2009 8:38 AM

This looks very cool indeed.
We just launched our Open Source microbloggging platform this week (in beta) and later this week a new version of our enterprise collaboration platform Blogtronix 3.0 (aka OzoneOS)
The new Open Source http://Blurt.it is multilingual (English, Japanese and Bulgarian for now) and multimedia support platform that also works on your mobile. We acquired a small European company that developed it and their team. I do hope that we will be go some great new open source projects here as well and give something back to the community at last. Go and give it a try online and download it guy, love to get some feedback. We have not even talked about this openly yet.

Cheers and great job by the dev team;)
Vassil

Posted by: Vassil | July 15, 2009 4:39 PM

Looks very nice. Congrats to the Atrium / Dev Seed team. I suspect Atrium will probably butt heads with Acquia, over other contenders.

Posted by: Sameer Patel | July 15, 2009 5:33 PM

@Viking KARWUR, very nice to see another Digital Viking. RWWARR!!

@Chris you're right. I can take you in hand to hand. ;-)

@Vassil congrats! Blogtronix is great! (So is ThoughtFarmer)

@Sameer Totally agree. This is interesting and shows promise and I too suspect this could butt heads with Acquia. However, if Acquia keeps to the web-service SaaS offereings to enrich Drupal maybe not so much. I doubt they will though. To be honest I have long thought they were headed for a collision with some of the large drupal shops.

Posted by: Aaron | July 15, 2009 10:25 PM