Feedback on Open Atrium

Hopefully this isn't too off topic, I love Open Atrium, and I have to say that the uber slick designs are a massive asset for your profiles. Perhaps you could share some of your design elements or build out an overall drupal theme / theme engine that could easily be used for other drupal installations? Possibly even a free theme for regular drupal sites?

I love the overall look, feel, and design of the product but I haven't used it to enough depth yet. I will be implementing an instance of OA for a new drupal dev team to integrate things like JIRA, git, doc management and project management, etc. I definitely want to find an effective tool for assisting with the monumental task of synching configuration separately from content, since OA is a drupal product itself, a drupal specific diff / code review & data migration tool would be a helpful addition, but I know it is asking for a lot. Maybe integration with existing tools like, say, gerrit would be helpful.

I know there are other, perhaps more appropriate tools like AEgir for things like this, but since we are all trying to support the drupal community, it might not be a bad idea to integrate this kind of drupal-specific functionality to ease the effort required by developers.

Just some thoughts... I'm spitballin here. :)

Andrew

Thank you very much for the feedback! We really appreciate it!!!

A lot of things could be improved with Open Atrium; using it extensively to manage our collaboration with most of our clients, I think it already does an excellent job at structuring the "must have" features. But hey, you asked for suggestions, so here I go:

• Cases; I would suggest not to add any features there, but to simplify it. I would recommend you guys have a look at Github's Zack presentation about how they use Github to build Github: http://speakerdeck.com/u/holman/p/how-github-uses-github-to-build-github. Especially around page 55, they describe their approach with regards to issues, the equivalent of cases in OA. I would seriously consider dropping things like the Priority, Type and simplify as much of the rest (too many Status IMHO). Dumb it down:

  

  Important things get done no matter what is your self organization of priorities, you can still leave a basic free tagging field for people who still would like to categorize. Also make the "Assign to" field easier by using a select type of element (average project has 8 to 10 people, not nice to have radios). Finally

• Dashboards; there is lot to do there, but one obvious need would be to have a central location for all Cases assigned to you. Also improve the way that people can interact with elements in lists; for now you need to click on a Case for example to be able to edit its assignee, would be great to be able to do that directly from the overview/listings. Overall, default dashboards could be much better but it's obviously a (long) process I won't attempt kick off here.
• UI; an overall refresh of the theme would be welcome. The current theme is great, don't get me wrong, I just think it could use some adjustments.
• Wording; lots of small improvements could be done there. Notebook? Wiki would be better (maybe). Cases? Call them Issues or Tasks. Blog? Discussions, Threads, I don't know, pretty much anything would be better.

And then for new features, I guess there are a gazillion things that could be attempted;

• Core support for the "Reply by email" feature,
• Designing some kind of quick notifications (ala twitter) directly within the groups,
• Better search interfaces,
• Unicorns,