Traction Introduces TeamPage Attivio Plus and Social Enterprise Web

June 29, 2011 at 1:19 pm · Filed under Web 2.0

I covered Traction Software a number of times on this blog (for example, Traction Team Page 5.1 Moves Forward with Project Management Capabilities and Traction Introduces New Capabilities and Partners with Team Page 4.2). At E2.0 Boston 2011 Traction announced two major new capabilities. TeamPage Attivio Plus extends permission-aware search and faceted navigation to external Sharepoint, Documentum, File server, Exchange and other sources, fused with TeamPage content. Social Enterprise Web allows you to discover, discuss, tag, task and use external documents or database records discovered by search or selected with a TeamPage badge (a “Like” button for collaboration). This brings content of external “Systems of Record” into the TeamPage fabric for collaboration and action tracking.

TeamPage Attivio Plus uses Attivio’s AIE technology to provide unified information access spanning sources with deep content analysis. Internal TeamPage content and external source hits are shown as merged results in time or relevance order. Here is a sample of TeamPage Attivio Plus search results.

You can also use TeamPage’s faceted navigation to drill down by selected source just as you currently can drill down by author, tag, key phrase, sentiment, etc. All external and internal search hits and faceted navigation are permission-aware, automatically showing just what each person has permission to see. External sources and access rules can be continuously and incrementally indexed, or updated on a specified schedule.

Social Enterprise Web is an integrated search and badging capability. With it TeamPage gains the capability to tag, discuss, task and share pages, documents and database records from external as well as internal sources. For example, a suggestion found in a customer email stored in Exchange, an issue with a new drug application filed in Documentum, or a comment on a legacy document stored in SharePoint, Lotus Notes, or the S: drive of a file server can be discovered, tagged, discussed, and tasked for follow-up action in TeamPage.

Here is an example of sharing a page (a weather report) from the Web on TeamPage.

Here is the shared item appearing on the Activity feed.

Using search as a lever to span silos and system of record makes their native content addressible and actionable in place without import or conversion. This is similar to the way search loosely couples content across many sources on the public Web, but focused on a business intranet. TeamPage adds: consistent authentication; permissioned-aware integrated search fusing TeamPage content and activity across external sources; indexing of siloed systems to share and use records that have no native Web interface; and indexing of tags, discussion and tasks in context to provide activity based navigation and search across all sources. For example, a content hit in a Word document stored in Documentum shows TeamPage tags, comments and tasks relating to that document

I also like what they are doing with Activity Streams as I think this is one of the most important features of an Enterprise 2.0 platform. Traction TeamPage 5.2 introduced new activity dashboards to make it simple to zoom into project activity streams to see related task status, edits, and discussion automatically drawn from the flow of collaborative work in any TeamPage space or context. TeamPage users also can zoom out to get a broad view spanning business activities using notification, faceted content navigation and search.

This directly addresses a problem that has generated a lot of recent discussion: How will people be able to cope with activity streams that contain lots of detail – important for broad awareness – without feeling overwhelmed and loosing valuable signals in the flow? Activity dashboards extend Traction TeamPage’s ability to tag or task any page, post, status or comment on any item seen or created in the flow of collaborative work and communication. TeamPage has always considered things at the detail level with their permission levels. This approach to handling Activity Stream information is consistent with their design principles and shows how collaboration and action tracking can be embeded in the flow of work while avoiding overload.