Open Atrium; Building a product with Drupal and the Power of Decentralized Features

Open Atrium is an opensource team intranet built using Drupal core, contributed modules and some custom 'glue' modules. I'll share the evolution of Atrium's development and talk about what lessons we've learned in developing this product using Drupal. How we identified needs and managed development of critical modules like notifications and casetracker, and when and why we began to develop new modules like spaces and features. Additionally I'll talk about the decentralized features model that has emerged from to Atrium development. The focus of this model is to enable easy replication of complex configuration between sites. I'll share why it became critical to Atrium and how it has since driven the system's design.

This presentation will look at the process of building an intranet application with Drupal, it will be geared toward drupal developers and project managers. Code examples will be few and I'll focus more on higher level issues like:

• Managing product features and use cases
• Managing parallel development on Drupal.org
• Offering a multilingual product
• Building for customization
• Using exportables to move configuration into code
• Leveraging 'meta-modules' like Features and Spaces

More about Open Atrium can be found here:

• http://openatrium.com
• http://www.developmentseed.org/blog/2009/jun/17/announcing-open-atrium-open-source-intranet-package-powered-drupal