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Announcing Open Atrium: An Open Source Intranet Package Powered by Drupal

Jun 17, 2009 by Eric Gundersen

Open Atrium (formally code named 8trees) is an open source intranet package powered by Drupal that’s fast and easy to install and start using, and open source so you can customize it to meet your exact needs. It’s first public release will be in mid July, and all of its code will be hosted on Github as an open beta. To be first in line to access the code, message @open_atrium on twitter.

As a team intranet, Open Atrium lets you coordinate on projects with the people you work with – whether that’s to facilitate programs around the world for an international organization, to organize the communications outreach for an advocacy campaign, or to run out simultaneous projects for a software development company. Out of the box you can create different spaces for different projects, add people to each space, and turn on different tools within each space, including a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a casetracker, and a micro blog.

Here are a few screen shots from our intranet showing some of its features:

Calendar

Group dashboard

Wiki with inline diff’ing

Shoutbox/Private Twitter

Project spaces within groups

Notifications

Open Atrium is extremely flexible, and this makes it different from a lot of the hosted project management systems out there. You can run it where you want to (including behind your firewall), and you can set it to be in your preferred language (English and Spanish currently, with Arabic and Urdu coming soon). And since you have all the code, you can customize it however you’d like, and you can do anything with it – like building on it, selling a customized version, starting a hosted service, or something else entirely.

We’re finishing a closed alpha release in which more than 30 Drupal developers reviewed Open Atrium, and we’re adding some final functionality that an international development project is sponsoring. The public beta release will come out shortly after those are wrapped up – in about four weeks.

We’ll be talking more about Open Atrium in the coming weeks. To learn more and get the beta release announcement, follow @open_atrium on twitter or email us at team@openatrium.com.

We can’t wait to hear what people think once they access the code.

Very neat!

Jul 17, 2009 by Daniel Chvatik

We just tried the beta – it’s very slick! How can people contribute to translate it into other languages? Do you have some sort of translation server up?

Daniel Chvatik

Adulmec

Wow

Jul 15, 2009 by Aparna Vashisht

We are a site based on Drupal and making the calendar look good has been a challenge.

We will most definitely look into using it for our site. Thanks!

Awesome!!!

Jul 15, 2009 by praveen

Never thought drupal can look like this. Seriously!! Great functionality with great UI too!

Jesus!

Jul 15, 2009 by Ramsalt Martin

I’m so impressed. Atrium will set a standard throughout the whole community. This is the best shit that’s ever made with Drupal. It contains so much inspiration. How You have solved administration and forms is totally the way to go.

Thanks!

Marvelous!!

Jul 15, 2009 by Ipsita Mishra

This is what I was looking for. I just installed it on my local system. The user interface is no doubt marvelous. Exploring the features now. Kudos to the Development Team. I hope to contribute back something ….

Congrats! Your blog is

Jul 15, 2009 by Sandip Saini

Congrats! Your blog is certainly great. Finally found the info I needed , I am really impressed!!!!!!Thanks for great sharing!!!!

exciting to install

Jul 14, 2009 by Eric Stephan

I’ve installed it and have been playing around. I really want to get my head fully wrapped around where the functions are right now, and all along the ideas for what it’s good for (and what it might be needing moving forward) will be coming.

Thanks for an amazing effort.

Countdown begins

Jul 13, 2009 by mukul

I’ve already started the countdown. Waiting anxiously for the release. I hope it’ll be easily customizable for a novice too!! Awesome sceenshots and great to have it from, i think, features/context/spaces dev team.

I could beta test this for

Jul 10, 2009 by Mike

I could beta test this for you too. I’ll probably evaluate it for work if it’s a viable alternative to Trac (plus more features).

Can't wait for the release day!

Jul 6, 2009 by mathias

I’m really looking forward to test Open Atrium as the main Projectmanagment-Tool in our small company!

A great contribution

Jun 29, 2009 by TJ Cook

+1 on all the accolades bestowed thus far. Can’t wait to see!

Would love to test this in our company

Jun 24, 2009 by Rod Gammon

For the past few weeks I’ve been working on something like this for an educational e-Publishing group in New York. You’ve come at the right time! (ahem, right time to save me time!)

If you need another tester, I can roll this out with a group of about 6 e-Publishing professionals in a real setting. Contact me privately and I can give you more details about the company if you want.

guys

Jun 24, 2009 by ben

wow i cant wait to get my hands on this gem. i work with ProjectPier, Activecollab and other stuff right now and cant wait to replace this with a drupal-PM-system.

you guys are wonderful, thank you!

Awesome

Jun 23, 2009 by Gary Cao

This looks amazing. Can’t wait to actually try the official release!

This will change everything.

Jun 22, 2009 by Terry Sutton

This will change everything.

excited

Jun 19, 2009 by Duran

As some one who is trying to concentrate his products and business around what drupal can do for me, and my clients, this is going to be an amazing addition to my tool set.

Thank you, I’m really looking forward to what I can do with this.

I love the look of this Open

Jun 20, 2009 by Koral

I love the look of this Open Atrium. Thanks you for sharing the news and screenshots.

Finally!

Jun 19, 2009 by Ximo

I’ve been looking at screenshots of 8trees and hoping my company would be able to ditch Basecamp/Activecollab some day, and it seems that day is getting closer! Thanks a million for taking this idea, that I’m sure many have had (“Hey, Drupal could do that a lot better!”), and working hard to make it a solid product that can compete with these lesser alternatives ;)

Can’t wait to try it out!

Very interesting, maybe it

Jun 19, 2009 by Richiesta

Very interesting, maybe it could be used also as a Social Community!

Can't wait

Jun 18, 2009 by Alicia

I’ve been struggling with making Drupal an effective Intranet platform for a couple of years and Open Atrium sounds very, very promising! I cannot wait to try it. Glad someone finally is addressing this area.

Excellent addition

Jun 18, 2009 by Scott

I’m looking forward to using this myself as I’ve been super curious about Features, Spaces, and other Dev Seed modules. Thanks!

Open Atrium : An End-User Perspective

Jun 18, 2009 by Ben

DS Team,

Congratulations!

As an end-user of 8 Trees (now Open Atrium), I want to attest to my experience with a great tool. I measure a toolset’s effectiveness based on how it integrates with my daily work; Open Atrium seamlessly brings together all of the features I need to work (collaboratively) like calendars, case tracking, blog/microblog, doc sharing, group/user administration…

Here are a few quick points:

  • *You can stand up a group and projects, add users and turn on/off features in seconds.
  • *OpenID = decentralized user access that can be centrally administered within OA.
  • *User managed profiles (great for expert-networking)
  • *Case tracking with ability to assign/prioritize, notify and manage cases
  • *Internal blogs/shoutbox replaced email without missing a beat; plus our organizational memory was retained and tagged for later reference.
  • *Channels mean you receive content how you like it (email/RSS/iCal/chat)
  • *Dashboard can be customized to my liking, great vizuals. Overall sick design!

    • Great work, guys…

    Zimbra Calendar Integration?

    Jun 18, 2009 by EndUser

    First let me tell you, this looks PRETTY & AWESOME!

    I’ve just one question for you guys, we use Zimbra at work, how hard would be to connect the Zimbra Calendar Data to the Open Atrium Calendar?

    I’m an end user, sorry if this is an stupid question and for my English.

    Typical, i start building something and DevSeed does it better!

    Jun 18, 2009 by a_c_m

    Looks brilliant, with the base of context/spaces/features it think this should really be an amazing tool. Cant wait to add more features!

    amaaazing

    Jun 18, 2009 by peach - all drupal themes

    It looks awesome guys! I’ve been experimenting with Drupal and Project Management for years. I’ve used a custom CCK/Views solution, I’m currently using Storm, and now it looks like Atrium is going to be even more awesome.

    Thx!

    very very nice

    Jun 18, 2009 by Martin Baker

    Beautiful work. I look forward to trying it out.

    Contributed Modules

    Jun 18, 2009 by IceCreamYou

    To what extent are contributed modules used in Open Atrium, and to what extent is there duplication of code? As the author of the Facebook-style Statuses module (facebook_status) which can do everything Twitter can do and more, I’m particularly curious if the “Shout” section is custom.

    Check out Drupal shoutbox:

    Jun 18, 2009 by Development Seed

    Check out Drupal shoutbox: http://drupal.org/project/shoutbox but also read about features, http://drupal.org/project/features, since it is something that could really reduce code duplications by reducing code. There is a screencast over here: http://www.developmentseed.org/blog/2009/may/29/making-and-using-feature...

    Waiting in the wings

    Jun 17, 2009 by Mark Woodward

    Looks very promising, and I’m eager to put it through it’s paces

    Mark

    WOW! Thanks

    Jun 17, 2009 by Mike Wheatland

    I have been struggling to do exactly this with Drupal for a little while now. Not being a developer made it very difficult to follow a lot of the very technical video tutorials on this topic and some of the configuration skills you need to get it working the way you want is out of reach for many end users.

    Thanks for this, I am looking forward to using this system as a community ‘social club’ section on my site.

    I have to say it again…. THANKS!!!!

    Thanks

    Jun 17, 2009 by perandre

    You guys are unbelievable. Big thanks!

    Open Atrium

    Jun 17, 2009 by Lanesa

    Wow, I’m always blowed away with the projects you guys unleash! Absolutely Marvelous Work Guys!!!! Awesome Screenshots.

    Lanesa

    Much needed.

    Jun 17, 2009 by BryanSD

    I think something like this is very much needed. The agency I work for has quite a few Drupal Intranet sites at their field offices and we’ve all been wondering how to tackle the need to support the various sites under a common distribution. Open Atrium may be the common denominator we’ve been looking for.

    The screenshots look awesome.

    Jun 17, 2009 by yaph

    The screenshots look awesome. Considering the existing contributions by Development Seed this will certainly be another milestone for the Drupal project.

    This is awesome. I’ve always

    Jun 17, 2009 by Frando

    This is awesome. I’ve always loved the screenshots of 8trees because they looked so exceptionally polished for a full featured Drupal site. And these here look even better. You are doing an amazing favor to the Drupal community. It will be highly appreciated.

    Woot!

    Jun 17, 2009 by David Notik

    Eric and team.

    Glad to see the official announcement. As one of the Alpha testers (I’ve been quiet I know), as the original creator of the Case Tracker module, and as someone who is very interested in “the future of work” and Drupal as “the ultimate team collaboration platform” (http://www.wovenlabs.com/node/121), I am especially excited about your contributions. After seeing 8trees (now Open Atrium) for the first time on a demo call with Jeff and learning more about what you’ve done (Context, Spaces and the like were major missing pieces of the architecture), I’ve decided it makes a whole lot of sense to standardize our own work in this area on this codebase. I look forward to working together and with the entire community to make this a stellar product. Props on what looks to be a great product.

    Best,

    —D

    www.d202.org www.wovenlabs.com

    Great work guys. We’ve been

    Jun 17, 2009 by Glenn Hilton

    Great work guys. We’ve been looking forward to it’s release.

    Very promising

    Jun 17, 2009 by joris_lucius

    This product looks very promising! Can’t wait to try it out. Also very curious about the customization possibilities, without ‘hacking’ the modules this is build on. The system looks very usable. Did you build it with an ‘own’ API and mabe some ‘private’ hooks? And with help of .tpl files? Keep it up!

    Kudos for releasing yet another cool tool!

    Jun 17, 2009 by Omar Bickell

    I remember asking if/when this stuff was going to be released and, despite not receiving a very clear response, having had confidence based on devseed’s track record that it would, indeed, be released someday. Well it is finally being done and, really, devseed deserves a lot of respect for it.

    Thanks!

    Omar

    Great Start!

    Jun 17, 2009 by Steve Krueger

    Awesome! Great to hear it’s finally going to be available for public consumption. It’s a great start for a basic project management tool :). great work guys.

    The UI looks awesome

    Jun 17, 2009 by shalo

    It’s not often that you so much attention payed to front-end when it comes to open source projects. Would love to get my hands on this just to review the front-end stuff alone. Was wondering when 8trees would be released, now we know, awesome work guys can’t wait.

    :)

    Jun 17, 2009 by NikLP

    Looking good guys! Can’t wait to have a play around with this. I’m also interested in the flexibility of this – I assume it runs on OG/CCK/Views/Messaging/Notifications/Context/Spaces etc?

    If there was some way to tie in version control with this in the UI then we could move away from Unfuddle as well… hmm! :)

    Web site: stunning. App: wow.

    Jun 17, 2009 by Wim Leers

    The web site looks stunning.

    The screenshots themselves show an amazing amount of polish as well. If I’ll start using a project management site again, it will be most definitely this one.

    Thanks you so much for making this into its own open source project! :)

    Great idea

    Jun 17, 2009 by Joe Murray

    Could this grow to be an alternative to basecamp? Best feature there is to do lists with delegation and a bit of support for time. Most important missing functionality is heavier weight project management stuff, eg task dependencies, scheduling, gantt charts.

    Looks Awesome!

    Jun 17, 2009 by Wes

    Wow, looks great! This is a necessity for the Drupal community, thanks a bunch.

    Looks Great

    Jun 17, 2009 by Kevin Quillen

    This looks great. How does it compare to something like say, Active Collab? That is what we are using, but I would like to move to a Drupal based system that is on-par or better. That way we could integrate other projects we have, like our centralized module management across all our projects, and access that in our intranet too.

    Can it be extended? Like if you create a Company, can you add some CCK fields like Server IP, Website, etc?

    Great addon

    Jun 17, 2009 by Bart Gysens

    Nice project to hook our project on; Drupal integration is good choice; good thinking guys