At tonight's DBUG meeting in Boulder Ian Cairns from Development Seed and Matt Tucker from pingVision demo-ed Open Atrium. These are my rough notes from the presenation. pingVision has taken video which will be posted in the near future.

Open Atrium is an install profile (albeit a complicated one) to create a client based intranet.

Open Atrium is an intranet in a box that has group spaces to allow different teams to have their own conversations. It comes with six features - a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a to do list, a shoutbox, and a dashboard to manage it all.

The system is designed so you can add your own features to the system. By using "Features" you can take existing modules, configure them, and then export them into a module. This module will set up all the configuration that you've set up with a given module or set of modules. This allows you to recreate the same elements over and over again for different clients.

Open Atrium uses Organic Groups to control access for clients. This helps configure a system that works in a similar fashion to Basecamp. You can choose which features you want to turn on features per group.

The dashboard is totally configurable by the user based on the features that have been enabled. A client can drag elements around.

The casetracker feature works with the wiki. If you are working on different products for a single client they can all be isolated. UI-wise they have tried to make it as actionable as possible. You can assign cases to people and flag priority and message people. You can toggle features per group.

Open Atrium is currently being translated to 16 languages - the effort is being crowd sourced.

Everything code-wise is GPL and the graphics are governed by BSD.

In less than a month, the install profile has enjoyed 25,000 downloads.

Development Seed want to see as many folks create as many features as possible. They see it as the most attractive element of the system.

How do you build features?

Check out:

http://Drupal.org/project/features
http://Drupal.org/project/context

You can set blocks and views within a context so you can control where elements show up in a very granular way.

A Feature is a module of configuration settings. Anything that is exportable can be popped into a Feature.

If you are going to create Features, you can run a Features server to store them. Eventually you might find yourself not going to Drupal.org grabbing modules and then configuring those modules - and then repeating the same action for another client. Instead, you could go to a private or public Features server, grab the feature set you're looking for and have the configurations set up in seconds.

Then Matt Tucker jumped in to talk about the pingVision implementation of Open Atrium.

pingVision took core Atrium and added a Feature for client directed changes as pingVision works largely in an agile methodology. This includes additions such as:

• Use cases
• priorities
• hours reports

The implementation was basic nodes with workflows.

Next Tucker built a gallery feature that provides you with a big image and thumbnails. He used Context to show where your gallery or images would exist on a page under different circumstances. A certain number of conditions and will trigger a certain number of actions. This changes the context of the display.

He then exported it as a "Feature" with the appropriate context. It grabs all the configuration settings and turns it into code for you.

It was a really interesting presentation. Thanks to Ian and Matthew for leading the discussion.

Check out Open Atrium - it is a very cool tool.