CTOG vs. Open Atrium

Shortly after publishing CTOG on drupal.org, Drupal Radar came up with a short review of it. Let me describe the main differences between CTOG and Open Atrium (referred to as OA from now on), after I had a thoughtful conversation with the OA guys at the #open_atrium IRC channel.

OA separates "Groups" (Organic Groups, OG) and "Projects" (Case Tracker, CT): a group may exist without any project in it, and any given project belongs to one and only one project. Any "Case" belongs to one and only one project. No case nor project can be moved to another group after initial submission. As Young Hahn explained, they were considering this several times during the development of OA, but decided that this feature (moving a case/project to another group) has quite a lot issues (regarding to audience, notifications, etc.), so they came up with this solution.

CTOG takes a different approach. Let's glue "Groups" and "Projects" together by using the same node type for them: group nodes become projects. With this scenario, the "(multi-)audience" vs. "(multi-)membership" question can be answered quite easily: it's easy to move a case to a different group (OG), since it's a different project (CT), and still: no case can belong to more than one group/project (which is a limitation of CT, anyway.) If a customer is a member of more than one project/group and she submits a case to the wrong project/group, then it can be corrected quite easily, even by utilizing the CT's comment form - as CTOG will glue the audience (OG) selector to the project (CT) selector. Anything else (audience, notifications, etc.) is to be handled by CT, OG and the accompanied modules of theirs.

To sum up: CTOG simply takes a different approach than OA. I am not a judge to decide which one is better: different expectations demand different approaches. Let the sitebuilder decide which way to go - I, for one, was not satisfied with OA's limitations, so I came up with CTOG (which, to be honest, adds some other limitations.)