In 2009, our friends at Development Seed launched a pretty revolutionary concept—a completely open source intranet-in-a-box called Open Atrium. It was regarded as a giant leap forward for open source, for social collaboration, and for Drupal. Way back then (okay, it was just four years ago), an open source solution that could stand toe-to-toe with proprietary solutions like Basecamp and SharePoint was unprecedented. Open Atrium came on the scene and directly into the limelight because for the first time, a distribution of the open source Drupal code base felt really and truly like an all-in-one product.
But as forward thinking as it was, even Open Atrium couldn’t have seen what was coming for this space. That in four years, the social collaboration space would explode with solutions ranging from intranet platforms to social networks designed for enterprise. That our collaboration needs would reach beyond our internal teams and out to our constituents and members. And that, more often than not, we’d be collaborating with our colleagues on our tablets and phones, as much as on our laptops.