The World Bank Launches "Communicate" Intranet on Open Atrium

Using Open Atrium to deploy a highly custom, enterprise grade intranet solution

The World Bank's Communicate intranet launched last week on Open Atrium. The nearly 1,000 person communications team spread around the world is better positioned to collaborate now that their main communication tool is custom tuned to their specific business processes.

By starting with Open Atrium and the Features site building paradigm, we were able to address the World Bank's custom needs on a broadly supported core code base.

Many of the core features of Open Atrium are key to the World Bank's intranet, including the groups feature that allows users to create groups, add members, and enable additional features like a blog, wiki, calendar, and case tracker to the group as needed. These groups are used for all kinds of specialized conversations within the organization. For example, the global communications team can assemble a team of experts to respond to an emerging crisis by creating a group, adding the appropriate experts, and using the space to formulate a response.

Groups can be used in formal ways that map directly to some of the World Bank's organizational structure and business processes, which were built into Communicate by customizing Open Atrium, and in more ad hoc ways to facilitate conversations around common interests. An interesting example of an interest group on Communicate is the Drupal conversation group, of which there are more than two dozen members who want to learn more about Drupal (and they even host meetups internally!). On the new site, finding colleagues with shared interests and needed expertise is easy thanks to a faceted search-based user directory that lets users identify others with a given expertise and invite them to a new group.

Moving to Open Atrium early made a lot of sense for the World Bank because their previous Communicate site, formerly called CommNet, was based on Drupal 5 and took advantage of Organic Groups and Spaces to let teams quickly create working groups and collaborate online. This is a key feature within Open Atrium and one that we've found is needed for many communication teams. The last version of the site was incredibly popular among World Bank staff since it put collaboration tools into their hands and let anyone who wanted to create a new group to start working with colleagues do so. This feature is now able grow with Open Atrium.