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I've been working on a Open Atrium project for a few months now and I wanted to get some indication from others.

The project is to create a system similar to Open Atrium, where we can have groups, users, and each group can have their features.

The reason we don’t wish to use Open Atrium is primarily because of our need for high customisation and speed. In our previous development experiments, we found that too many add-ons were needed to meet the goals, such has many alter hooks and added modules to create needed functionality, etc. This decreased the performance over time, and became cumbersome to manage.

The reason we like Drupal for this project is because of the centralized nodes. This allows for maximum customizations and virtually any type of content can be created for the system.

It may sound like a crazy question, but on a really rough estimate, what amount of time would it take to build something similar to OA completely from scratch not using any existing modules and only the base Drupal installation?

For the most part I agree it would be crazy to build our own, and we probably would use Groups, Features, Strongarm, CCK, Views, etc.

UPDATE: My intention of the question is more to identify what scale of a project OA really is, the time involved, the teams, the testing, etc. Many people don't quite understand this, as I did when I started with OA. When we realized that OA needs more and more customization for our needs, and I began building a duplicate of it, I started to think what would it take to build a similar product.

My estimate would be a team of 3-5 guys, taking a total of 1500-3000 hours. However, my experience with large projects like this is non existent. So I am interested to hear what the Drupal community has to comment.

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Its not an answer to the question but here is a post by josh koenig on how he and his team was able to serve 200+ req/second from open atrium - groups.drupal.org/node/56428 – Dipen Apr 28 '11 at 21:11
Go for Open Atrium. We are developing case tracker application for our local client. Of course with customization to pull users and assert from third party ERP and Zabbix. OA is great, it is going smooth so far. – Sivaji Apr 29 '11 at 8:57

closed as not constructive by kiamlaluno♦ Jan 14 at 17:53

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Building OA from scratch a really bad idea because a) the estimate would be in the thousands of hours range, and b) Using OA has similar benefits to using any other established project: it's been tested by hundreds to thousands of users.

I've done a number of OA customizations, and I find it just as customizable as any other Drupal application, and even easier in some ways.

You should look at Ideation, and any number of other addons to Atrium to get an idea on how to go about adding your own customizations.

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The reality is that OA is in the generic case, fit for a particular purpose. I built a duplicate of it using OG, Spaces, Views, etc, for my specific needs. This worked great, but required more and more knowledge of the core components. Something I wasn't wanting to do. My question is a tough one I know. I guess I am more after what scenario would be needed, the time involved to actually build a fully custom system, built off similar concepts to OA. – lordg Apr 29 '11 at 10:46

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