I have written about Traction Software several times before (see - Blog and Wiki Success Story from Traction Software). TeamPage is a hybrid blog and wiki collaboration platform that continues to add new features. I recently caught up with Jordan Frank, Traction Software’s Vice President for Marketing and Business Development.  We discussed several topics,

First, I mentioned that I have heard of continued success for some enterprise 2.0 firms even in today’s down market (see Are You Seeing Growth in the Enterprise 2.0 Market Even in Difficult Times?).  Jordan said that they are also experiencing this growth against the down market. Traction Software has announced that 2008 marks their sixth year of consecutive revenue and customer growth. They made their goals for the year by the end of the third quarter. This is good news for Traction and for the enterprise 2.0 market sector (see also the related - Economist Finds Strong Belief in Business Value of Social Software).

We also discussed the new Traction TeamPage Live Blog interface that works like Twitter or IM. It creates an automatically updating browser window you can park on your desktop (or iPhone). You type a brief note and everyone with access to that Live Blog sees their window update in seconds. But unlike Twitter or IM, Live Blog is backed by Traction’s TeamPage platform that provides scalable storage, security, integrated search, and the other capabilities within the TeamPage platform. Per project workspace, you can also set permissions such as who can read, author, edit and erase entries. I think this is a great idea to bundle micro-blogging into an enterprise 2.0 platform.

Live Blog is implemented as an AJAX enabled TeamPage skin which updates frequently, so conversations are near-synchronous. That means what you say gets pushed out to everyone watching the Live Blog page seconds after you post. Because the interaction is supported in Traction, conversations you might otherwise have in IM or Twitter can take place securely within a TeamPage context with a robust content, tagging and discussion model.

A Live Blog note on a critical issue can easily be tagged and referenced for followup, found in TeamPage search, or disseminated in an TeamPage generated IM, email, email newsletter or RSS stream. It also works great in mobile devices like the iPhone – see image below. This gives you many of the business features not found in Twitter and makes the micro-bogging model more business friendly. 

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