I have written about Traction Software on a number of occasions (e.g., Blog and Wiki Success Story from Traction Software - UK’s National Health Service (NHS) Orkney). Last week I had a chance to catch up with Jordan Frank, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, at Traction to discuss their new Team Page 4.0. Some of the key benefits include new blog/wiki workspaces that highlight both important and new information; personal profile pages to provide enterprise social networking and gather content and news by author; new search and navigation to make it easy to find, tag, refer to, and re-use information that’s been built through working communication over time; page templates and forms to help new users get up and running very quickly; and moderation to help to meet enterprise needs for content approval as well as wiki style collaborative work in progress editing until sets of pages are ready to be shared with customers, partners or internal audiences. Here are more details about these updates.

For the blog/wiki workspaces, TeamPage 4.0 now comes with a front page, project workspace that includes hand authored links, as well as dynamic sections, capable of easily surfacing what’s important or new. Each section now displays content in alphabetic or chronological ordering based on content queries or even event driven scenarios such as certain types of page edits, page drafts awaiting approval, pages recently published, and pages which have been requested as a result of wiki style page links. For each page you can see the edit history, the naming history, the moderation history, the tagging history, the comments history, and the email history. You can also give pages multiple names for different contexts. Below is a sample page with a number of the histories I listed.

The new TeamPage moderation model allows for collaborative or formally controlled approval of page edits and comments, as well as new content. With TeamPage 4.0, moderation users who can read “drafts” in any number of blog/wiki workspaces can view, navigate and search the entire system based on its draft state or based on the “latest stable” published state.

Access to the moderation history is also controlled by the per workspace permissions granted to individuals or groups. This makes it possible for members of the groups participating in draft discussions to see all of the draft history, discussion and content of any draft version, while groups who are not party to the draft discussion can only see the history and content of published versions. This makes it possible to support a “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” rule to enable more candid internal discussion and wiki style collaboration to establish a consensus (spanning many wiki pages if necessary) and use of attributed comments rather than draft edits for published content that represents an important stable consensus – or a legally binding agreement.

The Personal Pages have also been updated. TeamPage 4.0 users can build social networking style personal profile pages that also serve as blog spaces for each user - displaying section driven views of that author’s contributions to all workspaces that are visible to the given reader. The entries look like a blog post but they drawn from all content contributions by the person profiled. One NHS user created a Traction Widget to display his Twitter status in his Traction Profile. The Personal Page can also integrate with the company phone directory. You can add videos and link to such sources as YouTube, Google Maps, and QuickTime. Below is a sample user profile.

TeamPage 4.0 also includes out of the box Boolean search on any cross-section of content, authors, project workspaces and text, as well as FAST Module search, with context based relevance ranked results, linguistics, entity extraction, and interactive content drill down. Social tagging now allows for tagging within and across blog and wiki workspaces, along with display and navigational framework for looking at a tag or Boolean set of tags that may be applied to pages in a given workspace, or a collection of workspaces that a given reader has permission to see. Tag clouds as well as content are automatically permission filtered to allow the combination of more private and more public collaboration crossing internal groups as well as external customer, supply chain, reseller, and other external groups.

Team Page has been a highly rated enterprise 2.0 platform for some time. Traction Software was named one of the 100 Companies that Matter by KMWorld and is a winner of the RedHerring 100 and eContent 100 awards. The upgrades with Team Page 4.0 will only make it better.