In February of this year, Phase2 Technology acquired control of the popular Drupal-based Open Atrium system from its creator, Development Seed. Open Atrium is a team collaboration solution built on the Drupal CMS. Open Atrium is often used in team situations, including intranets and project management environments. The system comes with a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a to do list, a shoutbox, and a dashboard to manage it all.
We tracked down the Phase2 Technology team to ask them about their plans for Open Atrium. CEO Jeff Walpole and Product Manager Karen Borchert were kind enough to take the time to answer our questions.
Q. What are Phase2's plans for Open Atrium?
Phase2 is very excited to be involved with Open Atrium, but we did not want to move too quickly to change something so many people use and love without first serving the community and providing maintenance to its underlying module stack. Earlier this year, we released support packages around Atrium that allow more users the ability to implement and use Atrium with the help of our team's services. In the months since taking over Atrium, we've been delving more deeply into the involved and vibrant Atrium community to try to understand best what users are looking for in this product. We've talked to users about everything from technical needs to theming to documentation to community involvement. We've built some training around Atrium that we've conducted with some clients, and we're currently preparing a stable 1.0 release (it is officially still in "Beta" status). One thing that is certain is that we are looking to this community to be part of that road map and part of the growth of the product. We want to start by giving the community a more public place to see and find contributed Features that they might use for their own Atrium instances. And then we want to see more community involvement in building and improving Atrium in the future.
Q. Drupal 7 is out now and stable. When can we expect a D7-based Open Atrium?
At this point, there are no plans for a Drupal 7 release of Open Atrium in 2011. Because the product is stable and more widely used than any other Drupal distro, we have to be cautious to move forward only when necessary. There is a great deal of development happening on Open Atrium in Drupal 6 still, and we're excited to see that. Many members of the community are creating features and contributing them back, and we see that as a positive sign that Atrium on D6 is a robust and viable product at this time. As with all of our products, we are considering the best time for a move to D7, and factors that go into that include migration of key community contributed modules to D7, community needs for a D7 product, and the availability and interest of the community to help contribute to such a build.
Q. Any plans to integrate FileDepot or a similar file exchange program?
Improved file handling is in big demand and many ideas are under consideration for the core product or as improved add-ons. We are monitoring active development on a Filedepot Feature for OA, and the team at Nuvole has just released Atrium Folders, which you can read more about here. Our feeling is that if the community has visibility into something great for OA, it can and should be developed by them. We may chose to integrate one of those solutions or work with others to do so. One of our goals for supporting OA is to find better ways to highlightand make findable the excellent features that others are building.
Q. Is there a roadmap? How can we view it?
We are working on a more formalized road map that will be available soon at http://docs.openatrium.com/. Our technical leads for the project will be overseeing the 1.0 Open Atrium build, and will help to communicate the longer-term roadmap for what is in consideration for future releases.
In the meantime, here are some features and changes under consideration for Open Atrium:
Maintenance (Highest priority to be addressed in OA 1.0)
- Security updates and Drupal/module patching
- Critical bugs from the Open Atrium case tracker
- Documentation additions/improvements
Improvements and Enhancements to Existing Features
- Calendar (e.g. taxonomy awareness in color coding)
- Emails & Notifications (e.g. "reply to post", improved customization options)
- Case Tracker (e.g. better organization, filtering
- Members (e.g. search, enhanced profile attributes, better organization, filtering)
New Features (a sampling of some - mainly focusing on those contributed and built by the community and included in Open Atrium)
- File management
- Feedreader
- Ideation
- Improve dashboard/page configuration
- Improved OpenID/SSO integration
- Location awareness
Q. Any new themes in the works?
Not at this moment. AGain, we would prefer to see community developed themes, it is not core to the support of the base product where we feel the most priority for our team. We would be very excited to see what themers and designers in the community create for Open Atrium, and happy to help make community-contributed themes more widely available for this product.
This article originally appeared on OpenSourceCMS.pro.