Real time activity and message stream on Open Atrium
Breadcrumb
- Home
- PronovixBlog
- Real time activity and message stream on Open Atrium
Yesterday I saw this post with a video on the new P2 theme for Wordpress and how Automattic* is using that as a real time microblog like tool for status updates in their company. And it got me thinking...
For some time now we've been using Open Atrium in Pronovix for project management. But until today all of our real time communication takes place through Skype. At some point we tried to replace Skype with XMPP (because Skype didn't properly work on Linux) but once Skype worked again for all the colleagues Jabber got abandoned. One of the reasons why we were interested in Jabber was to integrate activity updates into our communication tool (e.g. posting comment, case, commit messages). So that we would be able to have a discussion and have a bot post newly created cases into our chat channel. Right now our workflow is as follows:
Wouldn't it be cool if you could have 1 interface with the activity/chat river of your team where you could create new cases without having to go into another context and then have that case submitted into the activity stream where your colleagues can react on it, either through inline comments (if you want it to be stored in the ticket history) or just chat messages? Today we did a short brainstorm on that in the office. We examined the following issues:
The schema below explains how we are now thinking of solving these questions:
This is a first draft of the specification, there are still a couple of things that need to be worked out and tested. For example:
PS: one thing that is getting me even more excited about this feature is the possibility to display activity streams from groups on other Open Atrium sites: with this system we could make it possible to have federated activity streams from all the Open Atrium sites you are registered on... PPS: This model will of course also work for non-Open Atrium Drupal sites
Kristof Van Tomme is an open source strategist and architect. He is the CEO and co-founder of Pronovix. He’s got a degree in bioengineering and is a regular speaker at conferences in the API, developer relations, and technical writing communities. He is the host of the Developer Success & the Business of APIs and the API Resilience podcasts.
Articles on devportals, DX and API docs, event recaps, webinars, and more. Sign up to be up to date with the latest trends and best practices.