I've been working with Open Atrium (OA) for the past several months. I'm interested in collecting reference links from others about how they are using OA so we can learn how to better use this amazing set of tools.
BAS Local IT Specialists (LITS)
The BAS LITS team supports a variety of specialized software and hardware that in turn support the business of running the university. This work ranges from supporting a specialized printer that prints payroll checks to server admin to application admin to Drupal sites to FileMaker Pro to physical security systems to emergency management... ok, you get it; everything.
My role has oversight over the BAS LITS and portfolio of IT services delivered throughout the division and campus. I'm very interested in Drupal development, so OA was a logical fit and allows me to consolidate my efforts to support my team and clients.
How We Work
We use a central ticketing system in ITS to manage work intake for our service catalog. LITS work is often for services not found in the central service catalog. I was looking for a method to manage projects and tasks at a high level; in fact, I'd been using Redmine prior to OA. I do the entry of the tasks and the LITS do the work. I keep the cases at a pretty high level of detail. This gives me a management overview of what I've assigned without requiring a lot of ticket updates by the LITS; a mostly happy split of duties.
Background and Configuration. I heard about OA at a Drupal meetup. In the same breath, I heard about Aegir. I thought OA would be a consolidation opportunity to get OA under Aegir and just another site in my portfolio. I've written about our Aegir usage in another article.
Our Aegir configration is running several platforms including OA beta 1 and 2, managingnews, drupal 6.14 for dev and prod servers. We've got about 30 Drupal sites running under Aegir.
What We're Using in OA
For most of our groups, we're using the standard features minus Shoutbox which hasn't been necessary for our work flows. I've added a few modules (Image, ACL, Backreference, Imagecache, Image Gallery Assist) to work with images and galleries.
How We're Using OA
In our LITS group space, I typically create projects and cases, assigning cases to individuals. Individuals receive notifications via email and can respond via email about the status of the case and any general notes they want to add. I modified the basic content type with a Due Date CCK field so that I can eventually build out a view using dates to provide me a management overview of the groups' work.
We've been working on getting our backup processes documented. So, I created a book and some child pages. I assigned child pages to individual LITS and they updated the pages with their documentation. I then edit the book and pages to give a consistent voice.
In our Physical Security Systems group space, I've been using the Case Tracker (CT) to create projects and assign cases. I try to keep the case descriptions at a high level. What's missing for me in CT for this space is a priority field. Since I've already added a Due Date field, I'll probably just add another CCK field.
I'm also beginning to work on mapping our business process around project proposals, project sizing and project approval into CT. Much of our work is working with clients to capture requirements and objectives which in turn, are used to fill out our project proposal template. Not all proposals turn into projects, but some do. For those proposals that may still be in the idea formation stage, I want to hang track on them in some way so we can continue to understand unmet needs.
Due to the recent occupation of Kerr Hall, I found myself in a lead role with the recovery efforts. Much of the documentation of damage generated media files (images, video clips). I created a new group space and configured the Image module with Image Gallery Assist to facilitate uploading a CD's worth of stills. I had looked at the PingVision feature, but I couldn't get it to handle batch uploads. Probably time for me to figure out how to package a feature... Anyway, this group space now has an image gallery and the standard OA features we've got running. Now, I need to assess how much support end users might need in understanding and using the tools.
Next Steps
Intranet and collaboration are commonly requested requirements from our clients. Our central IT services don't have an service offering in this area, so I'm going to continue to offer OA instances for those BAS units who need this type of service.
Having a working intranet that can be demonstrated to our clients helps. What helps more is demonstrating how a collaboration tool can be mapped to existing business processes and workflows; that's the next challenge to figure out.
For those groups interested in an intranet/collaboration tool, we'll also need to teach them the basics of creating and managing content and why it makes more sense to work within the intranet than via email and file servers.
Another step that I'd like to investigate and implement features for is our proposal process. I need to review existing features and determine if our process is close to an existing feature or if we need to roll our own solution from scratch.
OA References
I've been reading articles and watching screen casts. So far, there are not a lot of short articles about how different organizations are implementing OA. If we can generate any interest, these articles would make a good contribution to the community site.
https://community.openatrium.com/home
http://developmentseed.org/tags/open-atrium
http://www.idealware.org/blog/2009/08/manage-your-projects-with-open-atr...