Traction TeamPage
Encyclopedia
Traction TeamPage is a proprietary
enterprise 2.0 social software product developed by Traction Software Inc
of Providence Rhode Island
.
TeamPage is one of the first products in the enterprise blog
and wiki
market, with Traction release 1.0 shipped in 1999.
Traction TeamPage is a collaborative hypertext platform built to support working communication within and between groups and is modeled on Douglas Engelbart
's On-Line System (the first hypertext journaling system) and influenced by the work of other hypertext pioneers including Andy van Dam's Hypertext Editing System
and Ted Nelson
's Xanadu.
and permission based project workspaces.
Traction TeamPage is known for features including permission filtered bi-directional linking, paragraph level addressability and inline comment threads, and a journaling model which records time stamped label changes as well as wiki style content history. The platform includes a sophisticated permission model that aggregates multiple weblog/wiki spaces into Front Page, e-mail newsletter, and search views.
With TeamPage Release 3.5 in March 2005, it became the first blog/wiki type product with integrated WebDAV
.
Traction TeamPage Release 3.7.2 shipped in December 2006 with support for widgets, export to PDF or WordML briefing books, mobile skins, and a wiki-style edit history views with a roll-back option, and an optional FAST Search module providing automatic entity extraction and drill-down navigation as well as integrated attachment search.
Traction TeamPage Release 4.0 shipped in June 2008 with support for moderation, page name history and management and user profile pages. Moderation allows for typical publish and reject operations for comments, but also makes it possible for authorized users to work in and fully experience the Draft version of the wiki or flip to the Published version to compare. Page Name management is the first to introduce page name history, the ability to alias page names across wiki projects, and the concept of a global page name space from which names can be applied to any wiki project space.
Traction Software's Live Blog Micro-Messaging plug-in, announced November 2008, is the first implementation of micro-blogging
on an enterprise social software product. The original Live Blog interface can be deployed as an interface to a single workspace or across the server. It leveraged all the linking, tagging, threading and permission controls available throughout the rest of the product. In TeamPage Release 5.0, the Live Blog interface was evolved into a pervasive capability, present in each space and in a server Front Page wide roll-up which could display status posts from all users or those you are following.
Traction TeamPage Release 4.2, shipped in November 2009, brought subscription features into the interface, introduced the ability to reply to comment on subscription notifications, added Table of Contents navigation from root articles for each space down to their child articles, and bundled the Metrics plug-in into the installed software. Subscription features allow for easy subscription (via Jabber or Email) to a space, a user, a document or a tag. Metrics reports provide over view and detail on user read, author, edit, comment, tag, and search activity.
Traction TeamPage Release 5.0 shipped in June 2010 with Traction's "Proteus" user interface based on Google Web Toolkit (GWT) technology along with integrated Twitter -like asymmetric follower model, integrated microblogging
in each space, activity stream
s, extensible user profiles, incorporation of profile information into search, TeamPage Microsoft Outlook Social Connector, and other social networking extensions. Attivio
replaced FAST Search as the provider of optional Traction TeamPage advanced search capabilities.
Traction TeamPage Release 5.1 shipped 14 Dec 2010 with action tracking integrated as part of Traction's social software platform. One click can add a task tag to any Traction page, comment, status post or paragraph, with automatic rollup of actions by person, date, milestone or project. Projects can be used to collect a set of tasks and milestones to organize activities by date or common goal. Release 5.1 also incorporates Attivio with Advanced Japanese Linguistics for Japanese language content analysis and faceted navigation as well as international search over mixed Latin, Cyrillic, Middle Eastern and Asian language content
Traction TeamPage Release 5.2 shipped 10 May 2011, adding activity dashboards. Activity dashboards show consolidated status, actions, related documents and discussion centered on any project or milestone, drawn from the flow of collaborative work. Reporter Ron Miller summarized this as: "Using the project metaphor as the basis for understanding information in the corporate social stream, the idea is to give you a hook on which to hang the information." TeamPage 5.2 also introduced drag-and-drop file upload and image insertion for Web browsers supporting the new HTML5 standard.
Traction TeamPage has been recognized as InfoWorld's 2007 Technology of the Year award winner: Best Enterprise Wiki (see review), as well as a KMWorld magazine trend setting product in 2005 and 2006. TeamPage is one of seven social software products reviewed by Clay Shirky in Esther Dyson's May 2003 edition of Release 1.0 (TeamPage subtitle "Weblogs Grow Up") and one of nine blogging platforms evaluated in depth by Forrester Research's 2006 Blogging Wave report. Traction TeamPage is also reviewed in Fuld & Company's 2006 Competitive Intelligence Software Report
In a March 2005 report titled "Blogs Wikis & Beyond," Burton Group Analyst Peter O'Kelly wrote: "Although Traction's products are marketed as 'enterprise weblog' offerings, they are in fact powerful hypertext systems that exploit blog- and wiki-related advances to maximize simplicity but also do so on a scale that addresses elaborate hypertext application scenarios that would overwhelm wiki alternatives."
In an October 2008 Intranet Journal Review, in reference to the challenge of balancing unstructured collaboration with the need for moderation and audit controls, Paula Gregorowicz claims "TeamPage 4.0 offers some breakthroughs to this challenge via its moderation model which is likely to impact the face of enterprise intranet architecture."
A December 2010 AppGap review of Traction TeamPage 5.1 wrote: "This is the action tracking part of project management for the regular employee, not the program management office. It brings this activity into the enterprise 2.0 world as every task is treated as an object for comments, RSS, and made searchable to those with the proper permissions."
A free Deloitte Center for the Edge study on measurable business value of social software, published February 2011, includes an independent Deloitte case study of Traction TeamPage customer Alcoa
Fastening Systems. Deloitte's press release and study cite "a 61 percent reduction in time required for compliance activities" attributed to use of Traction TeamPage. The study includes quotes and data from Traction TeamPage customers Alcoa Fastening Systems and Ensign Bickford.
customer agreement represents the first significant enterprise site license of a blogging platform. In-Q-Tel (the venture arm of the US Central Intelligence Agency) invested in Traction Software starting in May 2000..
In 2003, the US Department of Defense CIO office funded a Rapid Acquisition Incentive-Net Centricity (RAI-NC) pilot program, titled the "Liberty Project," to study the business case for using weblogs for net-centric project communication and information management. The study involved funding to add the WebDAV
extension to the Traction platform and to support the following Liberty Project participants: Traction Software, The Office of Naval Research, the Army Night Vision Lab, Defense Acquisition University, Naval Underwater Warfare Center, Marine Corps, Ford Motor Company, and the New York City Police.
In 2005, Corante published the first detailed case study of an enterprise blog deployment. The case study, Dark Blogs Case Study 01 - A European Pharmaceutical Group, describes a CIO led effort to deploy Traction TeamPage for a Competitive Intelligence function which spanned the organization.
In 2010, Traction TeamPage customer Borlaug Global Rust Initiative
won a 2010 Forrester Groundswell award for social impact of its use of collaboration technology to organize, conduct, publicize and manage international research to combat a new crop disease that has the potential to devastate the world’s food supplies.
Other public Traction TeamPage customers include: Alcoa
, Ensign Bickford, Kuka
Systems, Enel (energy)
, Ipsen Pharmaceutical, Lucent, SITA
, the Western States Information Network, a law enforcement agency funded by the US Department of Justice and the State of California, US Air Force.
Proprietary software
Proprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder. The licensee is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, while restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.Complementary...
enterprise 2.0 social software product developed by Traction Software Inc
Traction Software
Traction Software, Inc. is a software company headquartered in Providence, RI, with an international presence in Tokyo via its partner Applied Knowledge Japan Co, Ltd. It is the creator of the widely used Traction TeamPage Enterprise 2.0 social software platform which participates in the...
of Providence Rhode Island
Rhode Island
The state of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, more commonly referred to as Rhode Island , is a state in the New England region of the United States. It is the smallest U.S. state by area...
.
TeamPage is one of the first products in the enterprise blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
and wiki
Wiki
A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...
market, with Traction release 1.0 shipped in 1999.
Traction TeamPage is a collaborative hypertext platform built to support working communication within and between groups and is modeled on Douglas Engelbart
Douglas Engelbart
Douglas Carl Engelbart is an American inventor, and an early computer and internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on the challenges of human-computer interaction, resulting in the invention of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to GUIs...
's On-Line System (the first hypertext journaling system) and influenced by the work of other hypertext pioneers including Andy van Dam's Hypertext Editing System
Hypertext Editing System
The Hypertext Editing System, or HES, was an early hypertext research project conducted at Brown University in 1967 by Andries van Dam, Ted Nelson, and several Brown students. HES was a pioneering hypertext system that organized data into two main types: links and branching text...
and Ted Nelson
Ted Nelson
Theodor Holm Nelson is an American sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of information technology. He coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1963 and published it in 1965...
's Xanadu.
Releases and Features
The initial 1.0 Release of Traction TeamPage shipped in December 1999 and included features for web based journaling, collaborative editingCollaborative editing
Collaborative editing is the practice of groups producing works together through individual contributions. Effective choices in group awareness, participation, and coordination are critical to successful collaborative writing outcomes. Most usually it is applied to textual documents or...
and permission based project workspaces.
Traction TeamPage is known for features including permission filtered bi-directional linking, paragraph level addressability and inline comment threads, and a journaling model which records time stamped label changes as well as wiki style content history. The platform includes a sophisticated permission model that aggregates multiple weblog/wiki spaces into Front Page, e-mail newsletter, and search views.
With TeamPage Release 3.5 in March 2005, it became the first blog/wiki type product with integrated WebDAV
WebDAV
Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning is a set of methods based on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol that facilitates collaboration between users in editing and managing documents and files stored on World Wide Web servers...
.
Traction TeamPage Release 3.7.2 shipped in December 2006 with support for widgets, export to PDF or WordML briefing books, mobile skins, and a wiki-style edit history views with a roll-back option, and an optional FAST Search module providing automatic entity extraction and drill-down navigation as well as integrated attachment search.
Traction TeamPage Release 4.0 shipped in June 2008 with support for moderation, page name history and management and user profile pages. Moderation allows for typical publish and reject operations for comments, but also makes it possible for authorized users to work in and fully experience the Draft version of the wiki or flip to the Published version to compare. Page Name management is the first to introduce page name history, the ability to alias page names across wiki projects, and the concept of a global page name space from which names can be applied to any wiki project space.
Traction Software's Live Blog Micro-Messaging plug-in, announced November 2008, is the first implementation of micro-blogging
Micro-blogging
Microblogging is a broadcast medium in the form of blogging. A microblog differs from a traditional blog in that its content is typically smaller in both actual and aggregate file size...
on an enterprise social software product. The original Live Blog interface can be deployed as an interface to a single workspace or across the server. It leveraged all the linking, tagging, threading and permission controls available throughout the rest of the product. In TeamPage Release 5.0, the Live Blog interface was evolved into a pervasive capability, present in each space and in a server Front Page wide roll-up which could display status posts from all users or those you are following.
Traction TeamPage Release 4.2, shipped in November 2009, brought subscription features into the interface, introduced the ability to reply to comment on subscription notifications, added Table of Contents navigation from root articles for each space down to their child articles, and bundled the Metrics plug-in into the installed software. Subscription features allow for easy subscription (via Jabber or Email) to a space, a user, a document or a tag. Metrics reports provide over view and detail on user read, author, edit, comment, tag, and search activity.
Traction TeamPage Release 5.0 shipped in June 2010 with Traction's "Proteus" user interface based on Google Web Toolkit (GWT) technology along with integrated Twitter -like asymmetric follower model, integrated microblogging
Microblogging
Microblogging is a broadcast medium in the form of blogging. A microblog differs from a traditional blog in that its content is typically smaller in both actual and aggregate file size...
in each space, activity stream
Activity stream
An activity stream is a list of recent activities performed by an individual, typically on a single website. For example, Facebook's News Feed is an activity stream. Since the introduction of the News Feed on September 6, 2006, other major websites have introduced similar implementations for their...
s, extensible user profiles, incorporation of profile information into search, TeamPage Microsoft Outlook Social Connector, and other social networking extensions. Attivio
Attivio
Attivio, Inc., is a privately held Newton, Massachusetts-based enterprise software company that produces and sells a unified information access platform that lets users find all types of information with a single query and analyze data extracted from text along with traditional data.Attivio's core...
replaced FAST Search as the provider of optional Traction TeamPage advanced search capabilities.
Traction TeamPage Release 5.1 shipped 14 Dec 2010 with action tracking integrated as part of Traction's social software platform. One click can add a task tag to any Traction page, comment, status post or paragraph, with automatic rollup of actions by person, date, milestone or project. Projects can be used to collect a set of tasks and milestones to organize activities by date or common goal. Release 5.1 also incorporates Attivio with Advanced Japanese Linguistics for Japanese language content analysis and faceted navigation as well as international search over mixed Latin, Cyrillic, Middle Eastern and Asian language content
Traction TeamPage Release 5.2 shipped 10 May 2011, adding activity dashboards. Activity dashboards show consolidated status, actions, related documents and discussion centered on any project or milestone, drawn from the flow of collaborative work. Reporter Ron Miller summarized this as: "Using the project metaphor as the basis for understanding information in the corporate social stream, the idea is to give you a hook on which to hang the information." TeamPage 5.2 also introduced drag-and-drop file upload and image insertion for Web browsers supporting the new HTML5 standard.
Analyst and Reviewer Statements
In July 2002, in an InfoWorld test center review of Traction TeamPage Release 2.8, Jon Udell of InfoWorld wrote "(Traction) can be best described as an enterprise Weblog system." This is the first use of the term "Enterprise Weblog" in the press.Traction TeamPage has been recognized as InfoWorld's 2007 Technology of the Year award winner: Best Enterprise Wiki (see review), as well as a KMWorld magazine trend setting product in 2005 and 2006. TeamPage is one of seven social software products reviewed by Clay Shirky in Esther Dyson's May 2003 edition of Release 1.0 (TeamPage subtitle "Weblogs Grow Up") and one of nine blogging platforms evaluated in depth by Forrester Research's 2006 Blogging Wave report. Traction TeamPage is also reviewed in Fuld & Company's 2006 Competitive Intelligence Software Report
In a March 2005 report titled "Blogs Wikis & Beyond," Burton Group Analyst Peter O'Kelly wrote: "Although Traction's products are marketed as 'enterprise weblog' offerings, they are in fact powerful hypertext systems that exploit blog- and wiki-related advances to maximize simplicity but also do so on a scale that addresses elaborate hypertext application scenarios that would overwhelm wiki alternatives."
In an October 2008 Intranet Journal Review, in reference to the challenge of balancing unstructured collaboration with the need for moderation and audit controls, Paula Gregorowicz claims "TeamPage 4.0 offers some breakthroughs to this challenge via its moderation model which is likely to impact the face of enterprise intranet architecture."
A December 2010 AppGap review of Traction TeamPage 5.1 wrote: "This is the action tracking part of project management for the regular employee, not the program management office. It brings this activity into the enterprise 2.0 world as every task is treated as an object for comments, RSS, and made searchable to those with the proper permissions."
A free Deloitte Center for the Edge study on measurable business value of social software, published February 2011, includes an independent Deloitte case study of Traction TeamPage customer Alcoa
Alcoa
Alcoa Inc. is the world's third largest producer of aluminum, behind Rio Tinto Alcan and Rusal. From its operational headquarters in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Alcoa conducts operations in 31 countries...
Fastening Systems. Deloitte's press release and study cite "a 61 percent reduction in time required for compliance activities" attributed to use of Traction TeamPage. The study includes quotes and data from Traction TeamPage customers Alcoa Fastening Systems and Ensign Bickford.
Funding and Customers
In June 2002, a public In-Q-TelIn-Q-Tel
In-Q-Tel of Arlington, Virginia, United States is a not-for-profit venture capital firm that invests in high-tech companies for the sole purpose of keeping the Central Intelligence Agency equipped with the latest in information technology in support of United States intelligence capability...
customer agreement represents the first significant enterprise site license of a blogging platform. In-Q-Tel (the venture arm of the US Central Intelligence Agency) invested in Traction Software starting in May 2000..
In 2003, the US Department of Defense CIO office funded a Rapid Acquisition Incentive-Net Centricity (RAI-NC) pilot program, titled the "Liberty Project," to study the business case for using weblogs for net-centric project communication and information management. The study involved funding to add the WebDAV
WebDAV
Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning is a set of methods based on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol that facilitates collaboration between users in editing and managing documents and files stored on World Wide Web servers...
extension to the Traction platform and to support the following Liberty Project participants: Traction Software, The Office of Naval Research, the Army Night Vision Lab, Defense Acquisition University, Naval Underwater Warfare Center, Marine Corps, Ford Motor Company, and the New York City Police.
In 2005, Corante published the first detailed case study of an enterprise blog deployment. The case study, Dark Blogs Case Study 01 - A European Pharmaceutical Group, describes a CIO led effort to deploy Traction TeamPage for a Competitive Intelligence function which spanned the organization.
In 2010, Traction TeamPage customer Borlaug Global Rust Initiative
Borlaug Global Rust Initiative
The Borlaug Global Rust Initiative was founded in response to recommendations of a committee of international experts who met to consider a response to the threat the global food supply posed by the UG99 strain of wheat rust...
won a 2010 Forrester Groundswell award for social impact of its use of collaboration technology to organize, conduct, publicize and manage international research to combat a new crop disease that has the potential to devastate the world’s food supplies.
Other public Traction TeamPage customers include: Alcoa
Alcoa
Alcoa Inc. is the world's third largest producer of aluminum, behind Rio Tinto Alcan and Rusal. From its operational headquarters in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Alcoa conducts operations in 31 countries...
, Ensign Bickford, Kuka
Kuka
Kuka may refer to:*KUKA, a German based manufacturer of industrial robots*The Namdhari sect of Sikhism*Pavel Kuka *The Kuka people, a Chadian ethnic group*Kukawa, a town in Borno State, Nigeria*Kuka is also a nickname....
Systems, Enel (energy)
Enel (energy)
Enel S.p.A. is an Italian energy provider, the third-largest in Europe by market capitalization...
, Ipsen Pharmaceutical, Lucent, SITA
SITA
SITA is a multinational information technology company specialising in providing IT and telecommunication services to the air transport industry...
, the Western States Information Network, a law enforcement agency funded by the US Department of Justice and the State of California, US Air Force.