OA2 and Spaces

Posted by rbolger on January 14, 2014 at 9:46pm

Hi - New member to the OA community.
I had a question - if I were setting up a site for a large corporation, would I set up a global space for everyone in the corporation, followed by subspaces at the regional, departmental level, etc? The reason I ask is I want some resources to be available globally, and not just to particular spaces. I didn't know if globally meant no space at all, or if it needed to be declared as a global space.
Thanks!
Ryan

Comments

I am new too

Posted by leofishman on January 15, 2014 at 11:04am

Have to decide for an intranet if going OA o clean d7.
Its there a chat-room or a forum to discuss best practices?

same place

Posted by rbolger on January 15, 2014 at 3:39pm

Hi Leo - I'm in similar place -
I'm convinced about Drupal + Panopoly and then my question is OA2 or build on my own. OA2 is fantastic, but my use case is outside of the norm and so I would not be using all of their features and so I'm not sure if it is too much overhead.
I'm having trouble finding OA2 experts to talk to - I'm hoping this forum will be the place.

I want to believe in OA2

Posted by leofishman on January 15, 2014 at 7:07pm

but once the intranet is online, we have to stick with whereaver choise we made, we are a little worry about security updates and adding modules not supported but OA2.

Also, is very important how we build initialy the intranet in terms of spaces, content types and so on, once is running it may be hard to change things and I still don't know enough about OA2.

Thanks

Context Is Crucial for Success

Posted by socialtechno on January 15, 2014 at 2:03pm

The Intranet Sites Drupal group https://groups.drupal.org/intranet-sites isn't very active at the moment, sadly.

Here's a good recent article: http://www.mediacurrent.com/blog/your-intranet-drupal

I would think more about what your organisation expects people to be doing on your intranet. Is it your first intranet or are you replacing an existing one? The 'right' answer and the 'best practice depends on whether you have a migration project; also, what kind of issues you might have growing and managing the community, whether people have expectations, and where you want to focus your efforts, to secure early adoption and smooth growth. There are several good Drupal 7 distributions with different features, and they could be brilliant or disappointing in different contexts.

Thanks

Posted by rbolger on January 15, 2014 at 3:25pm

Thanks socialtechno.
Really helpful article, I will refer to it often I develop the site.
My remaining question is what is best practice on oa2-- does one need to create a global space, or is any content not posted to a space global by default?
Thanks
Ryan

Have you seen the Phase2 screencast?

Posted by Diane Bryan on January 19, 2014 at 11:44pm

There was a Phase2 Screencast on OA2 that delves into a test case setting up a company's intranet. This might answer your questions. I found it in the OA2 documentation, "more webinars"

http://vimeo.com/79901116

Playing With Distros

Posted by socialtechno on January 15, 2014 at 5:38pm

Here's a little game I somtimes play when I'm trying to figure out whether a Drupal distro is right for me.

I open up the .info file (e.g. root/profiles/berkeley/openberkeley.info, which is for the UC Berkeley build of Panopoly).

Then I put a ; in front of some of the dependencies[] lines, to exclude any modules or functionality I think I'm not going to use. Then I run the install and take a look at the result. Sometimes I add dummy content using Devel generate.

It requires very few brain cells to do this, and it's a good way to get my gut feel engaged . If you don't need all of Open Atrium, try out 3/5 of Atrium plus 1/4 of Lightning. Your mileage may vary, but have fun.

distro-lite

Posted by rbolger on January 15, 2014 at 5:51pm

Great advice -- never would have thought of that.
Thanks!

rbolger: what we have done

Posted by mpotter on January 16, 2014 at 2:34pm

rbolger: what we have done for that specific use case is to create a top-level public space called "Global Content" or "Shared Content" and put stuff there. Then place views/widgets elsewhere on the site wherever you need to display this content.

The advantages of doing this are:

1) You get to use all of the Open Atrium 2 content types (that require a Space), rather than a single generic content type.

2) It's trivial to move content around if you need to control access later...you just update the Space field in the content and move it wherever you want.

3) You can use Sections to break the global content into different sub-categories, like "Global Events", "Global Announcements", "Global Documents", etc.

The only potential "con" is that you've created another Space, but OA2 doesn't care how many spaces you have.

As far as chosing a distribution, if you want integration between Panels (Panopoly) and Organic Groups, then Open Atrium 2 is what you should use. You can turn off stuff you dont want, like Media if you don't need Media integration, or oa_subspaces if you don't need sub-spaces. You can also just use OA2 as a starting point to build you own, although then you are "off the reservation" in terms of getting future updates.

I'd only start for scratch if you have a very simple use case. Hundreds of hours have been spent integrating all of these modules and getting them configured and working together and you'd need to do that yourself if you started from scratch. Panels/Panopoly + OG + Subgroups + Media + private access control is not a trivial matter.

helpful

Posted by rbolger on January 16, 2014 at 5:06pm

Thanks Mike
Great advice on the global
You sold me on Panels/Panopoly/OG/OA!

thanks

Posted by leofishman on January 16, 2014 at 10:30pm

thanks

Client Extranet

Posted by Dogtag on January 24, 2014 at 10:58pm

Hi everyone,

I am an independent consultant with several clients. My D6 site uses Organic Groups to provide client-specific portal spaces for us to collaborate. It allows me to limit access to content and communications to specific clients and it works wonderfully. But, it's showing its age.

OA2 looks like an ideal direction to move but I'm wondering how I would go about configuring the spaces. Here is what I'm thinking; can someone provide some guidance as to whether I'm thinking this through correctly?

Global Space. This is for anyone and everyone on the Internet. This is where I put my "company website" type content (my services, my experience, contact info, etc).
Client-specific Spaces. Each space would correspond to a specific client. Only authorized site members explicitly invited into a given space would see any of the content within that space -- including the space itself (no client would see a list of other client spaces).
Global Sections. All my client spaces would be set up the same way with the same potential content types (discussions, files, events, etc) so I'm thinking I'd create one section for each content type. Individual content would be created specific to a space so even though every space has an Event Section, each space would only see events specific to that space. Is this right?
Users. I think I would need five (5) user types, as follows:
+-- A. Unauthorized User (global, non-registered)
+-- B. Authorized User (registered, not assigned to a space)
+-- C. Portal User (Authorized User who has been assigned to one or more spaces)
+-- D. Portal Admin (Portal User with space-/OG-editing permissions, ability to invite)
+-- E. Site Admin (Me)

Does that sound right? I'm having a hard time figuring out how to limit users and content to space-specific permissions. Do I need Teams to do that?

Many thanks,
-Dogtag

Use of teams

Posted by Diane Bryan on January 27, 2014 at 11:51pm

I'm new to OA2, but this looks pretty sound.

Once you create a user, you assign them to their proper group(s), and they'll only have access to whatever that group has access to. For each space, you define what group(s) have access.

The one thing I'd mention is that teams are for specific projects. So if someone from your group gets together with two people from a client group, you can form a team to hash out a project together. So teams can be group-agnostic.

That's how I understand it anyway. I'm still fiddling, myself.

Comments

I am new too

same place

I want to believe in OA2

Context Is Crucial for Success

Thanks

Have you seen the Phase2 screencast?

Playing With Distros

distro-lite

rbolger: what we have done

helpful

thanks

Client Extranet

Use of teams

Thanks for the reply Diane.

eta for 2.16?

As mentioned here:

Open Atrium

Group organizers

New groups

Group notifications