Here comes Noot – the public sector social business tool

I’ve written loads in the past about the importance of using social technology in the workplace, especially in the public sector.

It’s great for tearing down silos, sharing knowledge, making the most of talent, completing projects successfully and maybe making life a bit more interesting.

One bit of technology I have had my eye on for a while is a bit of open source loveliness called Open Atrium, which is based on the popular and powerful Drupal framework.

What really caught my attention was that it was announced recently that the White House were using it to collaborate with. This is a bit of software that means business.

So I was delighted when I started talking with my good pals Harry and Rupert at Neontribe – web developers and user experience legends from Norwich (and who are organising RewiredState Norfolk this weekend, which you really ought to get to if you can). It turns out that they live and breath Drupal, and whats more, had started to get enquiries about OpenAtrium themselves.

We put our heads together and came up with Noot. Noot is a hosted Open Atrium offering aimed squarely at the public sector here in the UK. The Neontribe gang handle all the technical stuff, while Kind of Digital provides the consultancy and training to make sure customers get the most out of their investment.

Noot provides you with:

• Groups, allowing people across your organisation or from partner organisations to get together and collaborate.
• Discussions, so folk can talk to one another.
• Collaborative authoring, allowing people to jointly create and edit documents.
• Project and task management, helping to get stuff done
• File uploading and sharing
• Yammer or Twitter style status updates

…and a bunch of other cool stuff. What’s more, we’re going to be actively listening to users and developing more features to provide the functionality people really need.

So whether you just want to get people in your organisation talking to each other, want to manage cross departmental projects better, or start doing some serious partnership collaboration, Noot could well be the technology that suits your people and your process.

We’re still tidying things up, getting our marketing messages right and figuring out just how much we are going to charge for this thing. In the meantime, do follow Noot on Twitter, and bookmark the homepage so you know where to go to find out more.

If you’d like a demo or an early chat about Noot, you know where I am.