Traction TeamPage 4.0 Puts Hypertext to Work

Traction TeamPage Release 4.0 delivers a combination of wiki, blog, tagging and social networking capabilities that extend Traction's secure, simple and scalable hypertext platform to handle Enterprise 2.0 collaboration on the work that matters most to your business: developing products, communicating with customers and sales partners, collaborating with key suppliers, tracking business issues, and competitive intelligence.

One big problem for collaboration has been too many borders - technical or cultural - creating silos of information for no good reason - and many bad ones. However, it's also a big problem if you assume that every wiki page, blog post, tag or link can be seen and used by everyone in the extended enterprise.

For example, your product teams may want to work with many customers, suppliers and resellers to create and market a new product - but you probably don't want to invite the same external stakeholders to be peers in the same blog or wiki spaces used by internal stakeholders for contracting, confidential R&D budgets, HR policy or competitive intelligence; some spaces are more private than others. You could set up separate blog, wiki, social tagging and networking servers for every significant project or relationship (e.g. for work with each subcontractor, or collaboration with select customers and suppliers on specific projects) - but you'd end up creating siloed systems that are so clumsy for internal stakeholders that no one would want to use them.

It's much easier to use a system with separate spaces for broadly or narrowly drawn projects and relationships. Then, make it simple for moderators of each space to determine who can use wiki, blog, tag and networking capabilities within that space - and make borders invisible to people who have permissions spanning spaces. That's what Traction does.

Traction's unique hypertext technology provides search, linking, authoring, tagging, threaded discussion and syndication - the core capabilities of Enterprise 2.0 - in a framework that seamlessly spans one, tens, or hundreds of project spaces on the same TeamPage server. If you don't have permission - the project space and its content, links and tags vanish. If you have permission - project space borders becomes invisible, giving you a birds eye view of content, links, relationships and tag clouds spanning all the project spaces you can read.

You define project spaces that make sense for your business, and grant appropriate permissions to groups or individuals (including those managed by your LDAP or Active Directory servers or Traction). For example, you could create one project space for each major product, and one for each subcontractor or customer relationship, and as many spaces as you want for internal groups.

This enables you to seamlessly and securely weave together, track and link external intelligence, work product and discussions spanning your most important, valuable and confidential projects and relationships.

TeamPage 4.0 builds on Traction Software's award-winning secure, scalable and highly adaptable hypertext platform while adding new moderation, name management, social networking and notification capabilities that are simple to use and powerful. If you want to make your business work like the web, Traction TeamPage 4.0 is the best Enterprise 2.0 product to get the job done.

Traction TeamPage 4.0 features include:

Personal Profile Pages: Curious about a person you're collaborating with? Personal Profile Pages answer your questions and introduces Social Networking in the context of business collaboration. Each profile page creates a virtual blog including contact information, a self-authored description, optional picture and favorites, and a permission filtered roll-up of that individual's contributions across all projects.

Page and Comment Moderation: Traction's moderation model allows for free collaboration, or controlled approval of new articles and comments and draft edits. If you enable moderation in a project space, you add the capability to distinguish work in progress drafts versus published versions of pages and comments in that space. With TeamPage 4.0, people with permission to read drafts in one or many project spaces can view, navigate and search the entire TeamPage server seeing latest draft versions of all content, or click the published button to view, navigate and search the latest stable versions of all content. You can set permissions for each project space to grant or deny rights to post, read, edit, reject or publish drafts to any individual or group.

• With draft and publish permissions widely granted, TeamPage moderation supports wiki style collaborative editing of drafts spanning many pages - or projects - while keeping "latest stable" published versions available for reference until consensus is reached.
• With publish permission closely held, TeamPage moderation supports open collaboration followed by formal review and approval of important wiki content.

Access to the moderation history and Tractions' broader Audit Trail is also controlled per project space using permissions granted to individuals or groups. This means that members of groups participating in draft collaboration can see all of the draft history, discussion and content of any draft version, while groups who aren't part of the working draft collaboration only see the edit history and content of published versions.

This makes it possible to support a "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" rule within one or more projects for lively discussion and unconstrained wiki collaborative editing to establish a consensus (spanning many wiki pages if necessary). When a consensus is reached, you can document the decision by publishing the specific draft pages that documents the new consensus - or a legally binding agreement.

Page Name Management and Name History: Traction's unique Page Name history - combined with TeamPage 4.0 Page Name Management and Moderation - makes name linking simple for everyone, and "fearless refactoring" possible for wiki experts.

TeamPage 4.0's Link tool makes it simple to create a name link by typing a few letters of the page name and choosing a match from a dynamically generated list of names. You can also create a link by choosing from a list of pages that match a content pattern, or link to a Traction view, document attachment, personal collection or query.

When you change page names, incoming by-name links automatically update to show the new name. If you move the same name to a different page, the by-name links follow - with no broken links or lost comments. Page name history is an industry first, making it possible to understand "what happened" as you refactor and reorganize wiki pages.

When you really need to understand how a page has evolved, Traction's Audit Trail goes far beyond basic wiki edit history. You can browse the history and attribution of edits, moderation actions, page name changes, comments, tags added or removed, incoming and outgoing cross-references, incoming and outgoing email actions.

And more: TeamPage 4.0 also adds E-Mail and IM Notification for immediate notification on new post or edits - including rules to fine tune the kinds of events that interest you (works for Jabber IM notification too), Article Templates to create new pages with boilerplate format and content (such as a status report or product template), self-registration, inline filtering and sorting of TeamPage accounts defined by external LDAP or Active Directory queries, and many other features for TeamPage users and administrators.

See Traction TeamPage Videos for a quick tour of TeamPage capabilities

New! June 15 2010: See Traction TeamPage 5.0: Social Software for Work

For TeamPage 4.0 updates see:

25 February 2009 | Traction TeamPage 4.1 Release, New Activity Metrics & Content Ratings Plug-In

14 Oct 2009 | Traction Software Selects Attivio to Power Information Access for Enterprise 2.0 Social Software

2 Nov 2009 | Traction TeamPage Release 4.2 Adds Mobile Subscription, Notification, and Email Collaboration to Award Winning Enterprise 2.0 Platform

2 Nov 2009 | Traction Software Showcases New Collaboration Capabilities at Enterprise 2.0 Conference

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