The Beginning of ClikCollab

ClikCollab is designed to solve a couple of problems that have always been part of managing any complex project. Before building ClikCollab, we were using Basecamp and then (after bouncing around between a few other tools) we moved to Open Atrium. They were all great in a number of ways, but lacked something that in turn made our jobs harder than we'd like.

After using these intranets for a few years, we ran into enough pain points that we decided it was time to put our Drupal development skills to use to come up with a solution. Open Atrium is Drupal based as well, so we had done some hacking on it here and there; but in the couple of years we used it, there was not much happening development-wise. It's built on Drupal 6, we wanted to use our favorite Drupal 7 modules. So we decided to solve the problems ourselves and build it.

With Drupal being our expertise, we took time to scope out the direction we wanted to take the system, and how we could get there with minimal effort without compromising (too much) on scalability and infrastructure. We had 4 main areas we wanted to improve:  

1. Individual tasking: This was actually a serious pain point for us with our current tools. Project management tools have a way of focusing a lot on either Projects or Management (surprise, surprise). Our team is made of individuals who are constantly working on many projects. This resulted in them asking what they should be doing right now—not because they don't have a long list things to do, but because priorities are sometimes fuzzy between the many projects they were involved in. We wanted a dashboard that would answer this question for everyone across all projects.

2. Organizing communication: As we grew as a company, more and more information was getting spread out across everyone's e-mail accounts. We needed one central place that anyone involved in the project could check in and catch up to speed at anytime. To keep communication between co workers and clients organized we created a brand new Drupal module to track cases and comments, and progress as it happened. 

3. Simplifying workflows: As our team grew, different members of the team started having different responsibilities. Different responsibilities means different individual workflows. We had gone from too few workflow tools (Basecamp), to too many as we sought more powerful tools (our tweaked version of Open Atrium). We wanted to combine those workflows into one simple one to create a better way of keeping a project organized and making sure everyone was on the same page. Our solution was to leverage some already existing Drupal modules to put an infrastructure in place to allow a natural progress for each project. 

4. Clean user experience: Finally, we wanted a design that didn't reflect an out of the box Drupal experience. We wanted a user experience that would allow people to naturally and intuitively know how to use the system.  We wanted the system to require less clicking and less orienting yourself.

Granted, this is all still a work in progress. We have a long list of features we want to add, and we are looking for any feedback that our beta users are willing to provide. If you want to be one:

Sign up for a beta invite here

Follow @ClikCollab on Twitter for regular updates.