Open Atrium – Team Collaboration Software

Open Atrium is free open source team collaboration software that lets the team collaborate online. It is a nice integrated collaboration suite that comes with modules for blogs, calendar, document collaboration, case management, online files, and a general shoutbox. This is not an exhaustive list of features, and it even supports adding more features on top of the core features that are available.

Open Atrium uses a client-server model. You can install this software on your server running PHP, Apache, and MySQL. On client side, user just needs a browser, and nothing needs to be installed. So, it can be virtually accessed from anywhere.

Download Open Atrium

Features:

• Create Blogs: Users in Open Atrium can create various blogs and blog entries to track anything, or even share anything with entire group. For example, if you just got off a call with client and got new set of requirements from him, you can simply write up a blog post explaining all that. This will be available to all the users in the group, and you won’t need to communicate the same thing each member of the group separately. This also ensures that all the information is available at a centralized place and not scattered across emails.
• Collaborate on Documents: Document collaboration feature of Open Atrium is called Notebook. You can create and work on documents in this. It also lets you compare revisions, and print documents.
• Case Tracker: This is like a common to-do list. You can create any task that needs to be completed, and assign it to any member of that group. You can also track status of that task, and also post clarifications / updates on that.
• Calendar: This is a nice shared calendar on which you can post events, and even post availability / unavailability of anyone. Just a quick glance at it shows you exactly what is going on in any given day.
• [advt]ShoutBox: This is a quick way to share messages and links with people in your group. It is not like an instant messenger, but more like a Twitter feed. Just quickly post a message for everyone to see.
• Dashboard: This is the starting point of Open Atrium. It can be customized for each group. The dashboard shows all the recent activity, and notifications.