So yesterday, I was charged with creating an in house place to store reports and better manage different enrollment related workflows.  The idea has been tossed around for about a year, and since its the switch between academic cycles now was the time to start.   I had heard about this awesome new solution called Open Atrium.  Open Atrium is an intense modification of Drupal, a popular open source CMS.  Granted its still a “beta” but isn’t everything these days.

Open Atrium has a lot of great features.  One can create groups that collaborate using workflows, dashboards, blogs, calendars, shout boxes, and document flows.  Its touted as an “Intranet in a Box”.  I’m not sure if its exactly what we need, but the beauty of it is its open source simplicity (and complication).  Right now, I don’t have a lot to say, since its taken me roughly 2 days to even get it installed.  Now granted, I am more of a designer and thinker than I am a server administrator.   So that probably has something to do with it.   I will say this though, for an open source product, it lacks in one crucial thing.  Documentation and Community Support.  Never in my life have I found so many issues that are almost impossible to find solutions to.  As I’ve learned, software itself is very specific on what kind of platform it needs.  The documentation page itself sells the product, but that’s about all it does.  It has some very simple requirements, PHP5, PHP GD extension, 64MB allocated to PHP resources, MySQL or PostgreSQL (according to the install package), and Apache mod rewrite.

Yesterday, I spent the day working on my new Windows 2003 server.   Apparently, it doesn’t play well with windows.  The install script fails to add key tables to the MySQL database.  I even tried it with PostgreSQL.  In this case, (from what I can tell) the queries are half written for MySQL and half PostgreSQL.  So PostgreSQL doesn’t work.  In the end, I had to create my own Linux box (using Ubuntu 9.04 with LAMP server), and make the build there.  Let me say, its never fun to play around in Linux command lines, I forgot how much I hate VI.  Luckily, I was able to get things up and running, and get the install working on the first try.

The problem is, none of these issues are documented on the collaboration and bug reporting website, which is hosted through GitHub.  I found it extremely hard to find any answers to any of my questions.  In most cases, I didn’t find any mention of it at all, and when it was mentioned, the issues were closed with no response to the users inquiries.

Now, this doesn’t mean the product is bad.  From what I hear and seen, its pretty awesome for what it does, and I hope it does what I need it to do.  Granted it was a pain to install, but hopefully it will be worth it.  I know Linux is great and all, but there is a lot of infrastructure out there that uses Windows Server, you’d think that there would be more support for it.
Anyways, those are just my thoughts.  More to come soon…