Open Atrium: open source intranet first impressions

Today Open Atrium 1.0-beta1 was released. In short Open Atrium is an open source intranet platform based on the popular CMS Drupal. Even though I’m not a Drupal fan myself, I’ve been seen forward to try Open Atrium out as it is the only open source intranet platform that I’ve heard of worth mentioning. Check out the features.

So today I downloaded the beta and started installing it on my two-year-old-or-so laptop running a WAMP server. The Drupal installation guide is really straightforward and installation went like a charm. Almost. I had to set “max_execution_time” to 240 in php.ini and reload a couple of pages to make it work. Some of the installation steps took so long time to pass that I thought the web server had crashed, but that was not the case.

My first impression of Open Atrium is that it feels like a solid and flexible application (it should be, based on Drupal). It allows for an intranet to grow quite large. The GUI is also very nicely done. I like the fact that you can specify colors for your groups which helps to easily differentiate between them. There are some issues with the GUI though:

• When navigating between groups and sub modules/pages it’s not always easy to recognize where you are in the hierarchy. I think some kind of breadcrumbs would help a lot.
• Some buttons and links are placed in strange places and/or order which to me felt like breaking web conventions.

I also experienced the application as very slow performance wise. I did expect the performance to be quite bad as my laptop is getting old, but I did not expect every page load to take 2-5 seconds. I hope a faster machine addresses that problem.

Over all I was quite impressed with Open Atrium. There are some bugs here and there, but that is expected from a beta, and I am looking forward to future releases. There are more features coming according to the road map and I expect the community to contribute and add even more functionality. I would really like to see time tracking and time estimation added to the “Case Tracker” module for example.