Yesterday we opened up our Open Atrium development plans for feedback from enterprise users in intimate gathering here in Washington, DC. This was in preparation for gearing up for a stable release and the launch of the Open Atrium Partners Program and paid direct support this summer. Some very active and large scale Open Atrium users were in the room, and the feedback we got from them was awesome.

To give you a sense of who the larger Open Atrium users are, the meeting included representatives from four U.S. federal government agencies, two multilateral institutions, a handful of international NGOs, two private businesses, and one membership association. All of the organizations do very different work but are trying to address the same need to improve internal communication.

Our goal with this meeting was to get raw feedback on how Open Atrium works in enterprise use cases. After all this is beta, and one huge advantage of that is that we can integrate suggestions and feature requests from users — like what we got yesterday from some of Open Atrium’s biggest power users — into the next release and even into our next sprint.

Here are the big needs that were identified yesterday from our enterprise users:

• Document management integration (Alfresco and SharePoint)

• Internationalization and localization

• Better documentation around LDAP/AD support and single sign-on solutions in general

• Certification and accreditation for government agencies (There was a lot of talk about “CNAing” Open Atrium.)

• Stronger guidance with features and the UI to improve user experience and encourage better use of the features

• Stronger Calendar, Casetracker, and Shoutbox

• Better inline help

• More email integration

• Integration with multi-factor authentication systems used to protect sites run within the government

• Alternative to icons in the main menu

• Get rid of Drupal-isms

At yesterday’s meeting we also presented on the current status of Open Atrium and the community, our plans for the next release, the roadmap for a 1.0 stable release, and what we think will come after that release. All of that is recapped in my slides below.

Do you have ideas, feedback for us, or want to get involved? Then join the conversation on community.openatrium.com. If you have questions specifically about support or the partners program, please email us at [email protected].