A recent experience with Open Atrium 2

Recently, I installed and configured the Drupal distribution Open Atrium on Pantheon to create a site for managing a project.

One of the things I liked about Open Atrium was that I found it extremely easy to configure, with an interface quite similar to Drupal's.

Upon completion of configuration and redirection to the index, the offer of a tour of Open Atrium appeared (the next/prev buttons seemed to be disabled, however, until I refreshed the page). The links to support, documentation, and services were also helpful.
The tour itself was interesting; I did notice that at several points in the (local) tour the next button seemed to be disabled, which was confusing and meant that I was required to manually select the next stage from the dropdown help menu.

Some of the newer features of Open Atrium are its 'Spaces': collections of pages and other features such as discussion boards and wikis known as 'sections'. Within each space are also 'teams', or groups within the spaces' members.

I found the degree of customizability while creating 'Spaces' quite useful, especially the permissions control. Most actions were concise and easy to understand. I liked how clear it was to set up everything, particularly with regards to controlling the people it was shared with and what each user was allowed to do. The controls were easy, but it initially wasn't quite clear what a 'Space' actually acted as, until I read the documentation. There were also so many options and so much potential power that I wasn’t sure what each of them functioned as when I first began.

The many, many preinstalled features were also practical, especially as I didn't have to spend time finding, downloading, and configuring each thing I wished to have. Of note: groups, shoutboxes, and calendars, all of which were intuitive to use. They were reasonably easy to find, although I missed them the first time I began creating sections.

An interesting and quite useful feature of Open Atrium was 'Groups'. It provided an easy way to organize and collect people. It wasn't as easy to find as expected, as there was no clear way to find this option, until after I read the documentation. I also wasn’t sure what the difference was precisely between ‘Groups’ and ‘Teams’ until later.

I quite liked the 'Tasks' feature, which allowed me to assign and track tasks, although it was slightly less intuitive to set up. It seemed useful for setting tasks to specific members, and provided an easy way to track them. Particularly as I was setting up a site for managing a project, this meant I could assign individual tasks. I didn't like the default layout, though that was easily changed, but I did like the way it handled file management.

While changing my theme, I also noticed an error message, which did not occur again after I'd finished changing it.

Overall, I found Open Atrium a highly customizable management system for people and projects. While incredibly rich with features, it was rather overwhelming at first for a new user, but the tour was reasonably comprehensive and introduced most concepts well. The complex hierarchies of groups, members, teams, and roles, in particular, while useful beyond doubt, seemed a lot to take in for a new user.