Traction Software, has now released Traction TeamPage 4.1 along with new plug-ins for content ratings and user activity metrics. Here are my comments on the last release (Traction Software Announces Team Page 4.0 with Multiple Upgrades).  TeamPage 4.1 adds new features by making it easy to analyze user activity and rate TeamPage blog posts, comments or wiki pages to highlight and act on information that is important to the community. These capabilities are designed to support “wiki gardeners” and help identify best practices or patterns that can build a stronger community and improve its content.

TeamPage 4.1 introduces a new document management interface so users can get a “live” view of what’s going on in a Document Share Folder, signaling in real-time as documents are added, removed, and checked-in or out. This new interface incorporates the same AJAX technology used in Traction Software’s Live Blog micro-messaging plug-in, supporting Twitter style micro-messaging. I wrote more about that feature in Traction Announces New Integrated Micro-blogging and Solid Revenue Growth for 2008. I think Twitter like messaging can gain great power when part of an integrated platform.

The new Ratings plug-in allows workspace owners to enable one of two different rating methods. The 5-Star method enables you to highlight the average rating of ideas and other content. The “Thumbs up” (or “vote to promote”) method highlights the number of people who found a particular item to be interesting or useful. Here is sample ratings page.

TeamPage’s new Metrics plug-in generates reports so members and managers can track and assess Traction workspace activity. Users can now see what workspaces and which specific articles are read the most, and get their own view of top articles and comments by day, by week or over all time. For each article, the Metrics plug-in shows who read it and offers a link to the reader’s profile.

Metrics reports also offer insight into the collaborative process. While frequent authors are easy to spot, Metrics highlight key collaborators or “wiki gardeners,” who often work beneath the surface, improving content by editing, commenting and tagging. Reports also chart tags that are read or used the most, to help identify best practices and patterns that can be extended across workspaces. Here is a report with top contributors, top commenters, top taggers, and top editors.

I think these are all good additions enabling more of the social side of work to be transparent, measured, enhanced, and contribute to increased enterprise performance.