Hi All,
Just wanted to get your opinions on Drupal Commons and Open Atrium as an intranet solution. I've googled and found quite a few results, but I wanted to get a more recent and closer opinion of these 2 install profiles.
My impressions:
Open Atrium (http://openatrium.com/)
Pros:
UI looks great - people are more likely to use it. Really, the UI (look & feel, not ux), is stunning.
Features that come right out of the box, specifically: shoutbox, case tracker, groups
Community is large and active. I'm specifically keeping track of creating Agile Development features in OA.
They've been around for 2+ years.
Lightweight theme development (surprisingly). Uses sprites to optimize performance.
Shoutbox - twitter for groups.
Cons:
Don't know if it's going to die bc it was recently acquired from Development Seed
UI is not as intuitive as Commons.
Been in beta status forever. I know this doesn't mean a whole bunch to developers, but widespread adoption amongst non-developers is held back bc of this.
If you haven't work w/ Features before, you may have a hard time installing new modules.
Theming is also very different. There's another learning curve to theming specifically in OA.
Uses the Development Seed approach to Drupal. It's a different paradigm.
Drupal Commons (http://acquia.com/products-services/drupal-commons-social-business-software)
Pros:
Created by Acquia, Dries Buytaert's company and creator of Drupal.
UI is very intuitive. Not as visually stunning as OA, but ux is good.
Adding modules, theming, etc. is the same as vanilla drupal.
Social community features.
Cons:
Still very young. Community is not as big.
It has a lot of potential. But I worry that it may remain as that - untapped potential.
Doesn't have a Case Tracker like OA. This is HUGE for me.
It's hard to get object reviews on Drupal Commons bc a lot of their info is their own and is marketing spiel/buzzwords. Take a look at their Features. Please, just give me a list of what's in the current release, what I can and can't do. Not how this is going to make my business awesome.
Comments
Fail
I would like to respond to this, but I don't believe I'm going to have the time to do it justice. Maybe we can discuss it at the next meeting.
Basically, the two products have totally different target audiences, and unless what you're looking for is a conglomeration of the two, there isn't really a comparison. I would really like to discuss it further, because I'm looking for a solution, as well, that neither of these items totally handles.
Im using atrium for my own
Im using atrium for my own business and it works very well, specially the case tracker like you said.
I'm currently trying out Commons for a small and more "playful" community. Commons is less customized and theming is easier (and you should get to the theming, since the default theme is ugly, but clean so you can easily modify it). I feel like atrium is more work oriented, because there is a learning curve in using the interface, i think it is less pronounced in Commons.
Other thing, atrium is that it is HEAVY. If you use it, you should install memcache and authcache.
Case Tracker
If you like Commons, but need Case Tracker, why not just install the Case Tracker module into Commons?
Alternatives?
Hi,
is there any alternative to these two platforms?
Ste