I have written a bit about Traction TeamPage before. Jordan Frank, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, recently gave me a very informative demonstration that expanded my understanding of some of the things Traction can do. Traction combines some of the functionality of an enterprise portal with features of blogs and wikis to make a very useful enterprise platform. Here is part of what I learned.
Traction provides a platform that allows multiple blogs to be accessed through a portal like interface. The individual blogs are called projects. The interface is generally divided into three main columns, with other possibilities depending on your choice of “skin.”. The left column is primarily for navigation to specific blogs and their labels. The right side is primarily for tools. The wider central column is where the blog content appears, from one or many blogs depending on your view. Rather than simply showing a chronological list of all content, the central column can be segmented into configurable sections. Jordan’s examples included sections for status reports, recent articles (their name for blog posts), bug reports (if that is what you are using it for), recent to-dos, and an alphabetically ordered collection he authored. This allows you to partition your work space effectively. You create the labels in each project. You can make comments on any post, either as a whole or on a specific paragraph within the post. This is a cool feature to let you focus in on what you are discussing so dialogs can be more focused
There are many layers of access or permission, by post, by blog, etc. You can tag things and that tag can have an access function so only people who have rights to see things with that tag can access it. You can tag others posts and have you team see it, very useful for product development.
You can tag posts and comments with labels from their own blog. There is a social tagging capability too. So you can cross tag from one blog to a post in another blog. The blogs have an access function, so its possible that only some people will actually see the cross-tags on the blog.
You can also create PDFs or Word files based on any set of the blog content. There are many options here of what you show such as including metadata or not. You can even exclude selected paragraphs or comments as too sensitive, or for whatever reason, before you send it off. This makes a handy way of sharing blog content with clients and others. The PDFs can have active links to posts within the PDF and back to the server.
The calendar is integrated into search so you can search and navigate within a time frame or across the entire set of blogs. The calendar also takes you back in time in other ways so you only see the set of blogs and blog posts that were around at the time. This is one aspect of a very deep audit trail.
Within the enterprise you can see all the blog collections that you have access to. So there can be one for every client or topic, etc. Through what they call skins, you can customize the layout and functionality of the blogs. In summary, there is robust functionality here. I only talked about some of the things I saw. Traction combines some of the great features of blogs and wikis with the features that an enterprise portal would want to possess. enterprise 2.0
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