Early this morning I Tweeted that I was feeling quite geeky because I was installing Open Atrium on a server. While my installation didn’t go quite as planned, it did give me enough experience to say that I think Open Atrium could be a good Intranet solution for some schools.

Open Atrium is an open source program for running blogs, message boards, calendars, collaborative notebooks, and project tracking tools within your domain. You can create user groups within your Open Atrium installation.

Applications for Education 
To be clear, Open Atrium is not something that most classroom teachers are going to deploy on their own. It will take some time and some familiarity with servers (not to mention a server or server space at least) in order to get it up and running. Open Atrium could be a good platform for schools that want to create managed spaces in which their teachers and students can blog, message each other, and maintain appointment calendars.