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Traction Software recently released TeamPage 4, the latest version of its signature enterprise blog and wiki product. In this latest release, TeamPage takes hyperlinking and content relationships to a new level providing advanced integration and moderation of information which translates into greater usability and audit ability.

As Enterprise 2.0 continues to come of age, one of the challenges with blogs and wikis stems from its apparent unstructured and more chaotic nature. Compared to the deep and distinct silos of the past, this new model can sometimes flirt with the other end of the spectrum -- bringing content creation and interaction to the masses at the expense of moderated publishing, meaningful revision histories, and audit ability.

TeamPage 4 offers some breakthroughs to this challenge via its moderation model which is likely to impact the face of the enterprise intranet architecture. Its ability to leverage the power of hyperlinking to connect information across multiple workspaces, provide a meaningful history of content creation/editing, and do so in a permission based work environment that can be accessed in different devices on the fly packs a lot of knowledge management power into one platform.

Let's look at some of the key differentiators that make TeamPage more than just another blog and wiki product.

View Generation

Since its earliest release, TeamPage has always had an integrated dashboard, blog, and wiki with built in mobile device interfaces. The product does a good job of taking the same information and pouring it through different interfaces -- RSS, mobile, web, e-mail using its built in "skins". In addition, information can be exported into PDF or MS Word with an interactive table of contents. The export comes with a host of display options so you can include all/some comments as well as all/some of the cross-referenced articles without having to know where all that information resides.

In the browser based example shown here, you can see the 3 column layout is customized to have project, label, and tagging information on the left, content in the main pane, and date controls, feeds, shortcuts, and other tools on the right sidebar.

The main content is fully customizable allowing the user to choose which priority based information (to-do's, status, etc.), time-insensitive information (documentation, policies, etc.), and external widgets to display there. Using tags, users can put together different sections of information in a way that helps them organize the screen in a way that is most useful to them.

What was most interesting to me about the dashboard was its ability to give you a snapshot of a given project or workspace as of a given date in time. For instance, you could click on the date range from a previous year or given month and see how the project looked at that point in time. The dashboard would display to-do, priorities, status, news, etc. as of that particular date in time. While not a feature you'd use every day, it could be particularly useful from a project management and post-project evaluation standpoint.

All content within TeamPage rests on the foundation of a rich permission engine so users can see relevant and related information across different workspaces and apply tags to different groups to alert them to important contextual relationships (for example: marketing may tag a question as a priority for the engineering group). This breaks down information silos and provides a common view while still maintaining proper access controls.

Comments

Anyone who has ever commented on a blog post knows that all the comments are lumped together at the bottom. There is no easy way to determine which comment goes with which part of the article. Rather than be able to glean the knowledge you need at quick glance it becomes a search and rescue mission to find the relevant parts. With TeamPage, users can comment directly within a specific section of a larger post or reply to a comment and have it automatically threaded.

This style of commenting drives relevant content within the article body to contextualize it. According to Jordan Frank, VP Marketing and Business Development at Traction, "Within TeamPage, comments are not a second class citizen." Comments can be itemized, labeled and tagged within the context of the main article body. Users can add images, attachments, and other rich text formatting and all information is automatically cross-linked within and between posts. Just like the parent post, comments have a complete edit history associated with them.

Here is an example of how comments are integrated within the main content:

Moderation

For many use cases (HR policies, executive communications, and so on), there are requirements for moderated publishing. TeamPage has a number of built-in and necessary controls to facilitate and control this process.

Once again the underlying permission model plays a big role in enabling this functionality. Some users can only see published, public content. Others have the ability to read but not approve/publish drafts. This helps prevent duplication of effort where multiple people attempt to comment on or answer questions when someone else has already resolved the issue. Moderators can view and approve drafts to make them public. Using labels and the tag cloud, information can be instantly updated based on its current state.

These different levels of integrated permissions provide for:

Permission users to view, navigate and search Traction in "Draft" or "Latest Stable Version" mode

Simple actions for publishing, editing or rejecting content

Page locks to prevent certain users from editing specific pages.

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