Drupal Intranets with Open Atrium
Discover an intranet solution for your organization with Open Atrium
- Unlock the features of Open Atrium to set up an intranet to improve communication and workflow
- Explore the many features of Open Atrium and how you can utilize them in your intranet
- Learn how to support, maintain, and administer your intranet
- A how-to guide written for non-developers to learn how to set up and use Open Atrium
Main dashboard
The main dashboard provides an interface for managing and monitoring our Open Atrium installation. This dashboard provides a central place to monitor what’s going on across our departments. It will also be used as the central gateway for most of our administrative tasks. From this screen we can add groups, invite users, and customize group dashboards. Each individual who logs in also has the main dashboard and can quickly glance at the overall activity for their company. The dashboard is laid out initially by default in a two column layout. The left side of the screen contains the Main Content section and the right side of the screen contains a Sidebar. In a default installation of Open Atrium, there will be a welcome video in the Main Content area on the left. The first thing that you will notice when you log in is that there is a quick video that you can play on your main dashboard screen. This video provides a quick overview of Open Atrium for our users, and a review of the options you have for working with the dashboard. In the following screenshot, you will see the main dashboard and how the two separate content areas are divided, with a specific section marked that we will discuss later in the article:
Each dashboard can be customized to either a two-column or split layout, as shown in the preceding screenshot, or a three-column layout. Under the Modifying Layout section of this article, we will cover how to change the overall layout. As you can see in the preceding image, the dashboard is divided into three distinct sections. There is the header area which includes the Navigation tabs for creating content, modifying settings, and searching the site. Under the header area, we have the main content and sidebar areas. These areas are made up of blocks of content from the site.
These blocks can bring forward and include different items depending on how we customize our site. For example, in the left column we could choose to display Recent Activity and Blog Posts, while the right column could show Upcoming Events and a Calendar. Any of the features that we find throughout Open Atrium can be brought forward to a dashboard page. The beauty of this setup is that each group can customize their own. In the next section of this article, we will cover group dashboards in more detail. However, the same basic concepts will apply to all the dashboards. After our users are comfortable with using Open Atrium, we may decide that we no longer need to show the tutorial video on the main dashboard. This video can be easily removed by clicking on the Customizing the dashboard link just above the Recent Activity block or by clicking on the Customize dashboard link on the top right in the header section. Click on the customizing the dashboard link and we will see a dashboard widget on the screen. This will be the main interface for configuring layout and content on our dashboard. Now, hover over the video and on the top right you will see two icons. The first icon that looks like a plus sign (+) indicates that the content can be dragged. We can click on this icon when hovering over a section of content and move that content to another column or below another section of content on our dashboard. The X indicates that we can remove that item from our dashboard. Hovering over any piece of content when you are customizing the dashboard should reveal these two icons.
The two icons are highlighted in the following screenshot with a square box drawn around them:
To remove the welcome video, we click on the red X and then click on Save changes and the video tutorial will be removed from the dashboard.
Group dashboard
The group dashboard works the same as the main dashboard. The only difference is that the group dashboard exposes content for the individual departments or groups that are setup on our site. For example, a site could have a separate group for the Human Resources, Accounting, and Management departments. Each of these groups can create a group dashboard that can be customized by any of the administrators for a particular group. The following screenshot shows how the Human Resources department has customized their group dashboard:
In the preceding screenshot, we can see how the HR department customized their dashboard. In the left column they have added a Projects and a Blog section. The Projects section links to specific projects within the site, and the Blog section links to the detailed blog entries. There is also a customized block in the right column where the HR department has added the Upcoming events, a Mini calendar, and a Recent activity block.
The Projects section is a block that is provided by the system and exposes content from the Case tracker or Todo sections of the HR website. The Upcoming events section is a customized block that highlights future events entered through the calendar feature.
To demonstrate how each department can have a different dashboard, the following screenshot shows the dashboard for the Accounting department:
The Accounting dashboard has been configured to show a custom block as the first item in the left column, and below that a listing of Upcoming events. In the right column, the Accounting administrator has added a block which brings forward the Latest cases of all the latest cases, exposing the most recent issues entered into the tracking system. It is also worth noting that the Accounting department has a completely different color scheme from the Human Resources department. The color scheme can be changed by clicking on Settings | Group Settings | Features. We can scroll down to the bottom of the screen and click on BACKGROUND to either enter a hexadecimal color for our main color or pick a color from the color wheel as displayed in the following screenshot:
Spaces
Spaces is a Drupal API module that allows sitewide configurable options to be overridden by individual spaces. The spaces API is included with our Open Atrium installation and provides the foundation for creating group and user configurable dashboards. Users can then customize their space and set settings that are only applied to their space. This shows the extreme power and flexibility of Open Atrium by allowing users to apply customizations without affecting any of the other areas of Open Atrium. Users can use the functionality provided by spaces to create an individualized home page.
Group spaces
Group spaces provide an area for each group or department to arrange content in a contextual manner that makes sense for each group. In the preceding examples, the content that is important to the accounting department is not necessarily important to the human resources department. Administrators of each department can take advantage of Open Atrium’s complete flexibility to arrange content in a way that works for them.
The URLs in the example that we have been looking at are listed as follows:
- Human Resources: http://acme.alphageekdev.com/hr.
- Accounting: http://acme.alphageekdev.com/acct
Each URL is composed of the site URL, that is, http://acme.alphageekdev.com/ and then the short name that we provided for our group space, hr and acct.
User spaces
User spaces work in the same way that the group dashboard and spaces work. Each user of the system can customize their dashboard any way that they see appropriate. The following screenshot shows an example of the user’s dashboard for the admin account:
In the preceding screenshot, we have drawn a box around two areas. These two areas represent two different group spaces showing on the user’s dashboard page. This shows how content can be brought forward to various dashboards to show only what is important to a particular user.
