Collaboration

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.

With the boom of tech-savvy employees in the workforce, companies are in search of unique engagement tools to keep the Gen X and Gen Y employees interested.  In Dana LaSalvia’s article called “Building an Employee-Enriched Culture with Social Media” she wrote that “organizations should think about integrating companywide marketing messages and upgrading their employee’s recognition programs to be more virtual.” To do this, implement an intranet!

Peter Barron is an Intranet Connections Fan; he provides significant feedback on our blog, Linkedin and Facebook pages and speaks candidly about our software as it applies to his organization.  Over the past ten years, Peter has managed the Rio Rancho Public Schools intranet, which is internally called “Rionet”. With over 20 school district departments that use the rionet, Peter targets applications and widgets that make the intranet process fast and easy for thousands of users.

"Enterprise collaboration projects are almost always risky propositions. Storing and sharing information, potentially across departments and across the world, holds unquantifiable rewards for the business. Yet, if these rewards can't be realized by individuals, then the project risks failure."

- Matthew Sarrel, Tapping the Positive from Social Networks for Enterprise Collaboration, eWeek, November 15, 2010

Bitrix, Inc., a technology trendsetter in business communications solutions, introduces a survey of the top-10 most popular intranet collaboration benefits that allow organizations to improve internal efficiency and raise workforce productivity.

Based on analysis of 1.000+ real-life installations of Bitrix Intranet among small and medium-sized businesses and many years of implementing social-enabled intranet solutions, Bitrix has shortlisted the most popular collaboration features.

The top ten list reflects the most-used intranet collaboration features and correspond to the most popular adoption patterns. Intriguingly, the priority of listings doesn’t match the wide-spread notion of the customer demand among SMBs. Indeed, task management, shared documents and content search are on the list but concede position to the seemingly less important features like presence tracking, instant messaging and meetings management. This is due to the fact that SMBs normally start the intranet implementation not with the most ‘famous’ features but rather those which are easy to adopt.

The survey confirms that SMBs are mainly interested in simple collaboration tools with the shortest adoption period. The organizations prefer step-by-step intranet adoption that starts from the most commonly used features and ends with heavy-weight functionality. In fact, this process may stretch over months depending on the organization’s readiness, internal governance and c-level support.

Considering the growing popularity of the intranet technology, Bitrix predicts that in the next year this list may undergo a major shift. Many organizations will be one step ahead in the intranet adoption and proceed with implementing more comprehensive collaboration features. At the same time, we believe the market will be notable for greater awareness of the benefits of intranets, as vendors provide better guidance to speed up the technology adoption.

To name names, Bitrix anticipates business processes and records management, social CRM and e-learning to become shortlisted. The leading intranet vendors have already integrated these features to let organizations ease the burden of third-party software acquisition, implementation and maintenance. At the same time, these are crucial tools for effective business management.

Bitrix, Inc., a technology trendsetter in business communications solutions, introduces Bitrix® Virtual Appliance 2.0 – the world’s first dedicated ready-to-use solution designed to run social collaboration and e-commerce applications in the most popular virtual environments including VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Parallels Virtuozzo and Amazon EC2. As a result, SMBs can achieve cost savings up to 50% on deployment and management of applications and reach a new level of business continuity and agility.

Alfresco announced the release of Alfresco Community 3.4. Alfresco 3.4 broadens the reach of the company’s open source and open standards-based content management platform with new tools and services for Spring developers, Web Quick Start for easy web site deployment and content integration with enterprise portals.

“The demand for collaboration and social sharing around enterprise content is rising – and content that was once meant just for the intranet is now being re-purposed for the public web, external portals or even to destination sites across the web,” said John Newton, Alfresco CTO. “Through our implementation of CMIS as a core standard and new features in Alfresco 3.4, our content services platform can now manage and deliver enterprise content to any internal or external application in a way that traditional, monolithic ECM products can’t enable without significant time and expense.”

Key product capabilities for the Alfresco Community 3.4 release include:

• Collaborative Web Authoring – Alfresco Web Quick Start is a set of out-of-the-box templates for building content-rich websites on top of Alfresco Share. Quick Start combines the power of Alfresco Share for web team collaboration, with powerful content authoring and publishing services like in-context web editing.
• Office-to-Web Framework – Using Microsoft’s Office SharePoint Protocol and CIFS (shared folders), along with a new API integration with Google Docs, users can now author documents in their native office suite, collaborate in Alfresco or Google Docs, transform and re-purpose if required, and then publish straight to the web – even with sophisticated approval workflows. This feature will be available in a follow-on release Alfresco Community 3.4.b in approximately four weeks.
• Web Content Services for Spring – Built using the popular Spring and Spring Surf frameworks, Alfresco now offers key content management services that can be accessed via OpenCMIS and integrated into any web application. A combination of standard development tools and lightweight scripting gives Spring and Surf developers many options for building content-rich apps.
• Integration with Enterprise Portals and Social Software – The new DocLib portlets allow seamless integration with enterprise portals like Liferay, Quickr and Confluence. Using Single Sign On (SSO), the portlets provide access to both content and project repositories from within any JSR168 compliant portal.
• Distributed Content Replication – Native support for content replication allows organizations to run federated content repositories. Key documents can now be replicated to remote offices, enabling greater sharing of information, quicker access, reduced wide area network traffic and removes the dependency on a single system.

Alfresco has seen major adoption of its open source and open standards content management platform with more than two million downloads of Alfresco Community. Alfresco Community is a free-to-download, free-to-use version developed on an open source stack that runs on Windows, Linux or Mac. Alfresco Enterprise is certified against a larger range of technology stacks (both open source and proprietary), goes through a more extensive QA process and is provided with full commercial technical support.

"The fact is, however, that major IT projects are inevitably going to be about business change, and the two have to go hand in hand. As it continues its steady evolution, IT becomes less and less about individual products, languages or whatever, and more about getting things to work together."

-Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics, Organisational Change and IT: More than a bar-room conversation?, The Register, April 28, 2010

At the start of every year, I like to resolve to read a number of IT, CMS, and business related books. The Internet is a good resource, but perhaps because I'm too old school I still like to learn a thing or two from a book. So far I have three books on my reading list for 2010.

I plan to review each of these books at a later date but since I'm a slow reader I thought I'd share them now. Links to the books go to Amazon for a possible purchase are our available in CMS Report's Amazon store.

Mike Stefanello wrote to us earlier this month to talk about OfficeMedium. OfficeMedium is a web-based service that provides intranet and collaboration software for businesses and work groups. In a very competitive market, OfficeMedium appears set to try and win customers over by providing enriched business tools at a low reasonable price. OfficeMedium is pricing their services at a monthly rate of $8 per user plus $1 per Gigabyte used.

OfficeMedium utilizes the open source Drupal CMS. A case study for how Drupal was used to build OfficeMedium can be found at Drupal.org. Below is a copy of Mike's email talking about OfficeMedium.

We offer a brand-new web application that we believe your readers will be interested to hear about.

OfficeMedium: Web-based Intranet and Collaboration Software

OfficeMedium is a recently launched startup that offers on-demand, web-based intranet and collaboration software for businesses and work groups. The private and secure networks offer a wide array of features meant to centralize and streamline important information and data, unlike other applications which seem to focus on single, often over-detailed and confusing, offerings, such as project management, contact relationships, or "enterprise twitters".

Within a sleek, extremely simple and easy-to-use interface, OfficeMedium offers:

• Task and Event Management
• Personal and Group Calendars
• File Sharing, Storage, and Organization
• Contact and Company Information Management
• Automated Organization and Archiving
• Client Integration
• Social and Communication Features (such as private messaging, status updates, micromessaging, user profiles, shared blogging, poll creation, activity feeds, and more)