Wednesday, November 17, 2004
More about Traction Software
Disclaimer: Traction (R) is a registered trademark of Traction Software, Inc.
Disclaimer #2: Traction (R) Communicator (TM) and Traction (R) TeamPage (TM) are trademarks of Traction Software, Inc.
First, some information from a review article:
Levack, Kinley. "Traction digs in with traction TeamPage." EContent, 26(2), February 2003, 13-14.
Traction's TeamPage is an enterprise weblog designed for use behind corporate firewalls. TeamPage enables creation of a large store of data in XML format, posted onto a Web server and searchable by database. The product is positioned as a solution for competitive intelligence and market research professional. The end goal of the software is to create a "durable archive" for this type of intelligence.
The CEO of Traction Software, Tim Simonson, sees TeamPage as an extension of the communication strengths of e-mail. The issue, in Simonson's mind, is how can you store, organize, and retrieve information from an e-mail client? E-mail communications are by their nature unstructured. TeamPage allows the users to publish e-mails to the weblog and to sort based upon date/time or a category/classification (or both).
At the time of this article (February 2003), Levack quotes pricing: "The solution is priced at $10,000 per server and $125 per named user, plus an additional 20% annually for maintenance and support. A 15-user workgroup package is also available for $4,995."
My comments:
Even $4,995 + annual maintenance isn't peanuts!
A look around Traction's website shows that there are two levels of product, the Traction Communicator and Traction TeamPage. Traction Communicator is a simple environment with two named users and three "workspaces", while Traction TeamPage provides a full enterprise-wide application.
Most of the salient, distinguishing features of the software appear to be convenience-related. These features enable the user to import content quickly, to organize it and present it in multiple formats with little effort. Given enough time (and some computer programming expertise that I lack), I believe that a similar system could be put together from open-source tools. Of course, a business would buy the Traction package over open-source if the use of open-source and internal programmers is perceived to be too risky (in terms of cost, integrity of records, you name it).
I think that much of the future value of using a system like Traction TeamPage is determined by the effort the company puts in on the front end defining the organization and classification system used to identify content later. A corporation implementing TeamPage would greatly benefit from a well-planned approach to creating this classification system, involving both employee users and an information professional skilled in taxonomies and the creation of thesauri. The software doesn't help you determine this classification system (and I don't think that I would want any business intelligence software that forced a fixed taxonomy on my company). You have to know what you are doing, what kinds of information your employees need and how they will want to search for this information. These sound like obvious statements, but experience has taught me that ill-defined and unwritten expectations at the outset lead to disappointment and poor reception and use of the tool down the road.
In summary, Traction TeamPage software seeks to make weblogs "respectable" for business by providing in one package a journal and workspaces (weblog) with additional security and classification options. TeamPage also facilitates the addition of content to the blog, and provides additional publishing options (like a regular company newsletter from the blog).
There are other companies operating in this space. I will review Socialtext software soon. Socialtext is a wiki, a type of application closely related to weblogs that creates web pages that can be edited by essentially any reader.
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Disclaimer #2: Traction (R) Communicator (TM) and Traction (R) TeamPage (TM) are trademarks of Traction Software, Inc.
First, some information from a review article:
Levack, Kinley. "Traction digs in with traction TeamPage." EContent, 26(2), February 2003, 13-14.
Traction's TeamPage is an enterprise weblog designed for use behind corporate firewalls. TeamPage enables creation of a large store of data in XML format, posted onto a Web server and searchable by database. The product is positioned as a solution for competitive intelligence and market research professional. The end goal of the software is to create a "durable archive" for this type of intelligence.
The CEO of Traction Software, Tim Simonson, sees TeamPage as an extension of the communication strengths of e-mail. The issue, in Simonson's mind, is how can you store, organize, and retrieve information from an e-mail client? E-mail communications are by their nature unstructured. TeamPage allows the users to publish e-mails to the weblog and to sort based upon date/time or a category/classification (or both).
At the time of this article (February 2003), Levack quotes pricing: "The solution is priced at $10,000 per server and $125 per named user, plus an additional 20% annually for maintenance and support. A 15-user workgroup package is also available for $4,995."
My comments:
Even $4,995 + annual maintenance isn't peanuts!
A look around Traction's website shows that there are two levels of product, the Traction Communicator and Traction TeamPage. Traction Communicator is a simple environment with two named users and three "workspaces", while Traction TeamPage provides a full enterprise-wide application.
Most of the salient, distinguishing features of the software appear to be convenience-related. These features enable the user to import content quickly, to organize it and present it in multiple formats with little effort. Given enough time (and some computer programming expertise that I lack), I believe that a similar system could be put together from open-source tools. Of course, a business would buy the Traction package over open-source if the use of open-source and internal programmers is perceived to be too risky (in terms of cost, integrity of records, you name it).
I think that much of the future value of using a system like Traction TeamPage is determined by the effort the company puts in on the front end defining the organization and classification system used to identify content later. A corporation implementing TeamPage would greatly benefit from a well-planned approach to creating this classification system, involving both employee users and an information professional skilled in taxonomies and the creation of thesauri. The software doesn't help you determine this classification system (and I don't think that I would want any business intelligence software that forced a fixed taxonomy on my company). You have to know what you are doing, what kinds of information your employees need and how they will want to search for this information. These sound like obvious statements, but experience has taught me that ill-defined and unwritten expectations at the outset lead to disappointment and poor reception and use of the tool down the road.
In summary, Traction TeamPage software seeks to make weblogs "respectable" for business by providing in one package a journal and workspaces (weblog) with additional security and classification options. TeamPage also facilitates the addition of content to the blog, and provides additional publishing options (like a regular company newsletter from the blog).
There are other companies operating in this space. I will review Socialtext software soon. Socialtext is a wiki, a type of application closely related to weblogs that creates web pages that can be edited by essentially any reader.
# posted by Scott A. Curtis : 8:54 PM
