For the longest time now I’ve been agonising over how to manage my collaborations with partners and clients online. Many of the popular web workers swear by Basecamp, and I believe it is a great product. I’m not big on the monthly payment model for software as a service(Saas) and have instead opted for using tools which I can purchase once and own outright, run on my owner machine or servers and own my own data. I’m just weird like that. I also have a limited budget, which is probably the main motivating factor.
A Few great new tools I’ve started using
So, Recently I’ve had the pleasure of finding a few really great apps, which include The Hit List (awesome Mac task management) which I now use to keep track of all my projects and to do’s & iClockr (time capturing tool now known as Lumina) which I use in conjunction with Invoice 3 (invoice/billing app) to keep track of time spent and generate invoices from billable hours. These are great for my own personal use, but I was still without a crucial component of this mix, something I could use remotely, to keep track of interactions with clients and other partners.
Pay once or open source, no monthlies for me please
I don’t own a credit card and probably never will, so continuously having to pay for services online on a regular basis becomes a little tedious. I’ve tried out a few self hostable solutions like the new collabtive, open goo and a while back active collab, all of which seem to have the makings of a really good web office for the location independent web worker.
It was only a couple of weeks ago that something else caught my eye. Seems I’ve had quite a few of these in the last few months which is great.
Hello Open Atrium, goodbye basecamp
Say Hi to Open Atrium, a drupal based online collaboration system which could be used as an on the fly intranet or for many other purposes depending on your way of thinking of your ability to customize it.
I’ve been wanting to get into using drupal for a while, and this little beauty has pushed me a little closer to that point. It’s quite simple to install, not as simple as WordPress, but then WordPress doesn’t do exactly what this does out the box.
Open Atrium allows you to create mutliple private or open online spaces to which you can invite as many members for each group as you like. The groups allow creation of blogs, uploading and discussion of documents, posting of micro messages like twitter, creation of projects and tasks through it’s case Tracker as well as creation of events on a calendar. Each person’s profile has the ability to add profile specific versions of each of those tools as well.
What’s even better is it’s open source, easy to install and allows for integration of your own custom features as well if you’re into drupal development. I’m looking forward to seeing how the community extends this one. Check out a list of features as well as a nice intro video on their Feature Page at http://openatrium.com/features
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