I really like how Kashya Kompella from the Real Story Group offered a great dose of context for his E2.0 Marketplace Analysis Q2 2012: "Slightly modifying what the ancient Greeks said, you cannot dip your finger twice in the same (activity) stream." Simply said, there is not a lot of room for risk when an enterprise makes an attempt at an E2.0 effort, whether they are trying to build knowledge in a wiki, approach project management from a perspective managers actually like, or wrap up the whole effort with blogs, discussion, and a social networking layer on top.

In his 4D chart below, Kompella grades market players based on vendor business and product risk. Contrary to most quadrant analyses, this is a case where being high, right or upper right is not good.

By way of example, perhaps he grades Newsgator as low vendor and high product risk because they've been around a long time (vendor stability) but their product focus has changed entirely 3 times (from RSS client to RSS Server to Social layer on SharePoint).

The Vendor and Product risk appears general as the color of the circle also demonstrates an area of risk based on the vendor's focus on the E2.0 market. Oracle is the lowest rated on product risk, but they are colored white to indicate a very low focus on E2.0. So, perhaps Oracle is a good choice for your next database, but don't hold your breath if you are counting on them for your E2.0 platform.

Traction Software and our product Traction TeamPage show up low and to the left (low product and vendor risk) in a cluster with Microsoft and Oracle. However, we also show a Black circle (compared to White for Oracle and Purple for Microsoft) demonstrating laser focus on the Enterprise 2.0 market - as has been our focus since our founding and long track record.

Of course, none of this matters if the platform isn't any good. This chart doesn't say much about the product itself except for its focus and the rate at which its being overhauled, which can be a sign of innovation (good) but it also may warn of a sloppy underlying platform or poor vision as new capabilities are added. Traction TeamPage was built from the start as a journaling and editing system - which laid ground for every E2.0 "feature phase" starting with Blogs and then leading to Wiki, MicroBlogging, Discussion, Social Bookmarking, RSS, Project Management and User Profiles / Social Networking.

To gauge quality, there are ample analysts who've weighed in on that matter, showing TeamPage has a stable platform upon which we've been able to innovate successfully over the last decade. Here are a few recent indicators:

• Forbes.com contributor Haydn Shaughnessey says: "Traction, for my money, is the best conceived collaboration suite for companies that have a technical development requirement." He cites Traction Software as an example of a business that successfully competes with large companies like IBM by retaining: "... close attention to client needs, a personal desire to explore changes in the work environment, and a desire to see those reflected in the platform."
• The 9th Annual MIT Sloan CIO Symposium has announced Traction Software as one of ten finalists for the 2012 Innovation Showcase as its Traction TeamPage product represents a cutting edge B2B solution that combines the strong value and innovation to enterprise IT.
• CTOLabs adds Traction Software to its companies of note list, "firms we believe enterprise technologists should track":
• Jacob Morgan from Chess Media Group says: ’ve seen the Traction product a few times now I have to say that I really like it and not just for small and medium size businesses. Traction offers an amazing search integration feature which many large vendors can’t even come close to replicating."

So, if you want a platform that rocks and remains cutting edge in the E2.0 marketplace, all without introducing vendor and product risk, Get Traction! And do it risk free as we just introduced new hosting options and the opportunity to try it free for 30 days, then pay monthly. Check it out.

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Cambridge, MA – April 23, 2012 – The 9th Annual MIT Sloan CIO Symposium has announced Traction Software as one of ten finalists for the 2012 Innovation Showcase as its Traction TeamPage product represents a cutting edge B2B solution that combines the strong value and innovation to enterprise IT. Traction Software will receive key exposure to many of the world’s most creative and influential IT executives at the Symposium on May 22, 2012.

"Traction Software is honored to be selected as a finalist. CIO's should want to unlock actionable value hidden in their expensive line of business applications and scattered file system, SharePoint, or other servers," said Greg Lloyd, Traction Software President and co-founder. "Traction TeamPage's capability to search, navigate, tag, task, discuss and share live data in business applications or the public Web makes collaboration at work strikingly simple and effective: it works like the Web."

Traction TeamPage makes it easy for people to communicate, work together, and stay on top of what's happening anywhere in their company, connecting people, business applications, and the Web.

“We are very impressed with these top ten Innovation Showcase finalists, as their technologies demonstrate incredible state of the art thinking to today and tomorrow’s challenges,” said David L. Verrill, Executive Director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, and the Co-chair of the Innovation Showcase. “The Innovation Showcase provides a terrific one-of-a-kind opportunity for these start ups to gain a larger visibility in front of IT executives, key stakeholders, and venture capitalists.”

For a full list of Innovation Showcase finalists visit the Innovation Showcase Overview.

The Innovation Showcase will take place at 6:20pm in the Kresge courtyard tent on Tuesday, May 22, 2012, at MIT, in Cambridge, MA. The full agenda of the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium is available at the Agenda page.

About the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium
The MIT Sloan CIO Symposium is the premier global event for CIOs and senior IT executives to become better business leaders. In one day, CIOs and senior IT executives receive actionable information that enables them to meet the challenges of today’s changing global economy. The annual event offers a day of interactive learning and thought-provoking discourse on the future of technology, best practices, and business that is not available anywhere else. The MIT Sloan CIO Symposium is organized and developed by a team from the MIT Sloan Alumni Club of Boston, the MIT Center for Digital Business and the Boston Chapter of the Society for Information Management. Visit mitcio.com for more information and registration.

To stay connected to the community developing around the Symposium, please join The Global CIO & Executive IT Group (An MIT Sloan CIO Group), which can be found on Linkedin.com. Follow Symposium updates on Twitter: @mitciosymposium.

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Thanks to Jacob Morgan, Chess Media Group for his Tweet this afternoon while we were chatting on the phone. Last October Jacob reviewed Traction TeamPage in his Emergent Collaboration Vendor series, and liked what he saw, including TeamPage pricing. He said: "I had the pricing explained to me so I understand it but I think it would be helpful if they made it easier to understand for all site visitors because it really does make sense." We agree on both points! In updating the Buy page, Chris Nuzum used Apple Store product configuration pages as benchmarks for clarity and ease of use.

We followed Jacob's price comparison model, providing interactive feedback on per user per month pricing as well as an annual roll-up and clear option pricing. Cloud-hosted TeamPage is featured front and center - with hosted TeamPage free for your first month, at $1.87 per person per month for 100 people. All TeamPage products include integrated action tracking for project and case management that works like jazz, not something out of 1984.

Pricing options includes cloud-hosted Attivio premium search and Social Enterprise Web, choices of workgroup or full TeamPage configurations, flexible pricing based on the number of named accounts, and easy upgrades when you want them. Cloud-hosted TeamPage is great for small to mid-size organizations who want to punch well above their weight without hiring or adding IT staff.

I'd change Jacob's probably the coolest and say the coolest, no doubt! Thanks Chris! Go to the Buy page and see for yourself.

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With Dartmouth President Jim Kim's recent nomination to the World Bank, I pulled out my copy of Mountains beyond Mountains to find the Kim quote that I found most inspiring for my day to day work.

From page 294:

"And," he says, "another secret: a reluctance to do scut work is why a lot of my peers don't stick with this kind of work." In public health projects in difficult locales, theory often outruns practice. Individual patients get forgotten, and what seems like a small problem gets ignored, until it grows large, like MDR. "If you focus on individual patients," Jim Kim says, "you can't get sloppy."

Sure, guiding customers on their social software use cases (one of many things I do in a day) seems somewhat insignificant compared to eradicating Tuberculosis in Haiti (one of Jim Kim's missions when founding Partner's in Health with Paul Farmer) though we do have the occasional case such as the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative where software is being used to combat a plant disease which, unabated, would cause a great deal of starvation.

Nonetheless, there is useful wisdom in the focus on the individual patient which, in my case, is the software user, their business need and corresponding use case. A very current example is a customer we are working with this week in an effort to make TeamPage meet some very particular project management reporting needs. We've provided Q&A support over the course of a few months, but not until we took the a "journey to the sick" (a practice of Kim's PIH partner Paul Farmer, where he takes routine hikes to patients in hard to reach towns) did we understand the process fully enough to prescribe an approach and technical solution.

While most folks get up and running perfectly well TeamPage, there are various that could do things better. This was one of those cases where the customer did OK for months but wanted to improve their use case prior to an all out replacement of a custom built project management system.

Another case was an energy company that tracked issues with Wiki pages because that was the first thing they tried. It worked for years so they didn't even consider using Tasks for each issue - an immediate recommendation we made when we finally saw what they were up to.

All too often, RFPs and their corresponding software requirements roll up a set of user needs into a list of features that you check off to qualify. But underneath all those checks are some very specific processes and quirks that a feature list alone will never support.

You can't just solve a software problem in the abstract any better than you can solve a health problem without seeing the patient, their living conditions and even the political environment in which they live. It's crucial to take the long journey to visit (by foot or by web meeting, of course) the user to see the content, examine legacy systems and understand the skills and challenges facing people involved.

Jim Kim did great things for Dartmouth and I wish him luck in getting the position at the World Bank. For anyone that doubts his credentials, I suggest a read of the World Bank's strategic themes- most of which refer to basic clean water, nutrition and infectious disease issues which devastate the poor countries that the Bank is trying to assist. These are the issues Kim faced very directly at PIH.

Forbes.com contributor Haydn Shaughnessey says: "Traction, for my money, is the best conceived collaboration suite for company’s that have a technical development requirement." He cites Traction Software as an example of a business that successfully competes with large companies like IBM by retaining: "... close attention to client needs, a personal desire to explore changes in the work environment, and a desire to see those reflected in the platform." Thank you! Shaughnessy is co-author of a new ebook, The Elastic Enterprise an account of how some stellar companies are reinventing business. » Read the article.

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For the eighth consecutive year, KMWorld recognized Traction Software by naming the company to their KMWorld 100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management. The list is compiled by a team of judges including KMWorld editors, analysts, system integrators, theorists, practitioners and a few select users. "We're honored that KMWorld continues to rank Traction Software as a company that matters in Knowledge Management," said Greg Lloyd, Traction Software President and co-founder, "In 2011 Traction Software released TeamPage 5.2 introducing capabilities make live content in external documents, public or intranet Web pages, and even database records social objects seamlessly integrated with Traction TeamPage's action tracking, search, collaboration and communication. I thank Traction Software's employees and customers for earning this recognition, as well as KMWorld for awarding it." » See the 2012 KMWorld 100 list

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From Nora Ephron speaking at Brown University, President's Lecture series, "Adventures in Screenwriting" April 24, 1997. Paraphrased notes by Greg Lloyd: I took my first journalism course in high school. The fellow who taught it left after two years and opened a hardware store in LA. I think I was the only person he taught who went on to work as a journalist.

We learned the basics of story writing - who, what, when, where - and then learned how to write a lead. One day, the teacher wrote something like this on the board:

Mr. Charles Fenwick, principal of the Broadmoor High School, and his staff will attend the regional educator's conference in Wilmington on Thursday April 25th. Dr. Raymond White, state Secretary of Education, will keynote the conference, which will also feature an address by Dr. Marsha Newman, High School teacher of the year.

He said, "Write the lead." We sat at our desks and wrote, Dr. White to keynote educator's conference, Fenwick to lead teachers on trip to Wilmington and so on.

We turned them in. The teacher looked them over and said "No. What's the point?

"Your lead is, No School Thursday"

At that instant, I thought "What's the point? What a wonderful question!"

Feb 15, 2012 Reading John E. McIntyre's excellent blog post The Things Editors Do reminded of a point that tickled me in Nora Ephon's talk. Her story seems particularly apt in the age of Twitter, activity streams, and social software.

Happily I had a record of my notes posted in Traction Software's TeamPage server automatically carried forward from pre-release version of TeamPage, and still as easily findable and quotable as my latest post. - grl

"If what you write does not related to the point, it may be good, but it will likely end up on the cutting room floor." ~ Nora Ephron, Adventures in Screenwriting, April 24, 1997.

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CTOLabs adds Traction Software to its companies of note list, "firms we believe enterprise technologists should track": The future of work: 
collaboration, conversation, identity, work product, action tracking and activity streams in context, coupled by permission-aware deep search, spanning systems of record and transactional business systems. Traction TeamPage connects people, actions, what you create or find in TeamPage, the public Web, your company’s intranet and your line of business systems, simply and securely. » Read the full quote

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Happy Birthday Doug! A perfect gentle knight of technology as well as a pioneer and great inventor. Doug Engelbart's 87th birthday - today - is a fine day to watch the video of Doug's talk "The Strategic Pursuit of Collective IQ" embedded below. And a great day to (re) read Doug's "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" 1962, see DougEngelbart.org. My favorite Doug quotes and links, see Doug Engelbart | 85th Birthday Jan 30, 2010 from two years ago.

[from archive.com] "The Strategic Pursuit of Collective IQ" - Doug Engelbart's presentation at the The Brown/MIT Vannevar Bush Symposium in 1995, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Bush's groundbreaking article "As We May Think". Introduced by host and long-time friend Andy van Dam, Doug recounts his discovery of Vannevar's work, briefly describes the unfolding of his own work and what's next using hisBootstrap "Paradigm Map", and shares his wish that, had he only known that Vannevar was still alive in 1968, he would have sent him the film of his 1968 demo. See Doug's Abstract and Bio for this talk. Presentation: 50 minutes; Q&A 10 minutes.

See the Video Archives - Bush Symposium page at the Doug Engelbart Institute website for links to all 11 sessions of this Symposium.

This movie is part of the collection: Doug Engelbart Video Archives

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Forbes.com contributor Hayden Shaughnessy writes: "By moving social media practices into the enterprise we will change the way senior managers communicate, the way employees communicate with customers, and possibly people’s experience of work." He asked three platform vendors, including Traction Software President and co-founder Greg Lloyd, to respond to three questions on how a company can make social a success, starting from Day 1 requirements, benefits to the employee and enterprise outcomes . Greg's advice includes: "“Social” use can informally open up a timeline of activity to make it easier for people working on the same activity – including people who may be from different parts of the organization or even customers, partners, suppliers. Jon Udell and Jim McGee call this “Observable Work” (on a personal basis “narrating your work” hits many of the same points). It’s very easy to do, and generally well accepted – people learn by example." » Read the article

See related Enterprise 2.0 and Observable Work
The Future of Work Platforms: Like Jazz
Borlaug Global Rust Initiative Wins 2010 Forrester Groundswell Social Impact Award
and TeamPage Connected Work

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ITPro Active has published a white paper by Traction Software Partner Applied Knowledge Co, Ltd on Social Enterprise Knowledge Management and Search. A Google English translation of the article begins: "Knowledge management is an eternal challenge for companies. Traditional knowledge management approaches are not quite accumulated knowledge and fresh content to help you develop your business even if the substrate is stressed not utilize excessive accumulation have also been organized, and there is a problem."

"As a solution to these challenges is to leverage the structure of social networks like Facebook and blogs, and enhanced security and access privileges for enterprises, "enterprise social computing" is effective to introduce. Furthermore, this "search" By fusing a vast company that distributed the "knowledge" that enables integration of information."

See Google's English translation of the ITPro article and register to download the white paper (in Japanese).

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PRNewswire Dec 7, 2011: Leading unified information access company, Attivio, suggests alternate approach to all-out ban. "Visionary companies must find ways to change the way e-mail is used; not banish it," commented Sid Probstein, Chief Technical Officer at Attivio in response to widely reported news that a 'zero email' policy is underway at one of the world's largest IT companies. Thierry Breton, CEO of British-based Atos, wants to phase out e-mails over the next 18 months.

Probstein offers prescriptive guidance for businesses facing similar challenges. "Workers are drowning in information overload, so Mr. Breton's reaction to the effectiveness and value of e-mail is natural and visceral; but reverting to phone calls and verbal conversations for most internal correspondence is not the answer. The reality is that businesses need to enable efficient collaboration amongst their workers, and they need to preserve and provide access to historical information. Otherwise, they are perpetually re-inventing the wheel each time similar issues arise." ...

Organizations can dramatically reduce e-mail volume by using it where it makes sense, by deploying Traction TeamPage and other advanced Enterprise 2.0 collaboration tools for specific tasks like project management, discussion groups and exception handling. The federal government, for example, has taken this path to reduce e-mail volume. A recent Department of Defense study reported a 50% reduction in time spent on electronic communications management after implementing Traction in a technology testing program.

"The key to effectively managing e-mail is to retain the right information and enable users to control it as they do any other important corporate resource," explains Probstein. He provides tips for end-users to create value from e-mail:

• Link internal correspondence that relates to external communications from customers and partners;
• Use a Unified information access strategy to identify relevant, messages;
• Secure and index e-mails with other important files, E 2.0 collaboration tools, intranet pages, and content from CMS or competitors' websites;
• Discover e-mail through the normal process of search, running reports, or monitoring dashboards.

Good advice Sid! Read the full Press Release

See also Extending the fabric of work, or How to Be Emergent
Email isn't dead - It's only sleeping ...

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At the Enterprise 2.0conference two weeks ago, Tony Byrne (President, the Real Story Group) and Rob Koplowitz (VP and Principal Analyst, Forrester Research) were joined for the SharePoint Analyst Panel. David Carr's Information Week column Does SharePoint Have Future As A Social Platform frames the debate as lopsided with a simple conclusion: No.

IT Managers across the globe are deploying SharePoint in hopes that it will form the basis of their collaboration and social strategy, but SharePoint's ability to check off the feature lists (yes, it has a notion of profiles, pages, tagging, discussion, tasking) belies the actual outcome.

Koplowitz said: "it's a lot better portal than it is a social platform." (I am not convinced that this implies it's a good portal)

Byrne said: "They've built a decent platform for lightweight file-oriented collaboration... But SharePoint only provides two of the 10 or 11 key applications enterprises are looking for" in a social platform.

Byrne said: "the dirty little secret of SharePoint is that the vast majority of its usage is for very basic file sharing."

Koplowitz said: "If you're going to take on this beast--if you're going to take the buffalo down--you'd better be prepared to consume every part of it."

Not very promising.

An easy way to handle basic file sharing or even construct a basic portal may be an important part of an information strategy but isn't worth the true cost of SharePoint and doesn't merit the upside down 3 to 1 (by a conservative estimate) services to licensing cost ratio that any company should be ready to swallow if they want to tune and customize SharePoint to do more than what it's good at out of the box (some portal and lightweight file oriented collaboration activities). Following that path is expensive and led Thomas vander Wal to write SharePoint: Gateway Drug to Enterprise Social Tools.

If you don't have SharePoint, Koplowitz' fair warning is you better be ready to take the buffalo down. But the good news if you already have SharePoint is twofold:

1) It is OK at short term, small team oriented file collaboration and always will be.

2) You can break down the workspace and content type silo problem and make that locked up content more findable, social and valuable by adding TeamPage to the mix. For far less than it would cost to re-engineer "social" into SharePoint or even upgrade it to the 9s to run their FAST Search, you can unlock it's silos and socialize around it with TeamPage Attivio Plus Search and Social Enterprise Web.

Why stop with a social wrapper around or inside SharePoint. By making Connected Workpossible with TeamPage, you can also engage across all your other enterprise systems, content, and even the entire web.

I just joined the Nov 2011 W3C Social Business Jam and added a discussion topic: Seamless integration can work like the Web. I'm on deadline for Enterprise 2.0 next week in Santa Clara [ see you there ! ] but will try to steal time to jump in to a live IBM Jam while it's open (through Nov 10, 2011 8pm EST).

The description for Seamless Integration begins: Are there effective ways to combine legacy applications with new social technologies to help foster or encourage greater use in the company? If so, can it be done incrementally?

I propose:

... integration of social software (now "systems of engagement") and transactional systems where work gets done (now "systems of record"), using the same W3C protocols and layers over W3C protocols that make the public Web successful: Web-standard content delivery, links, and link-aware search."

The world inside a social business differs from the public Web in many significant ways: a) it's much smaller; b) it's very link-deprived compared to the public Web; c) there's a lot of redundant content (think of all of the copies of the same slide deck distributed in email); d) some highly valuable content isn't linkable at all (think legacy systems of record); e) finer-grain permissioned access rules are much more important when you want to open up the most of what the business does, and what people in the business know. On the plus side, social business activity adds valuable context.

This bring issues like consistent and reliable identity, consistent and reliable access controls (over W3C protocols), representation of context, and permission aware search to the top of the queue. I believe these issues can be addressed by system architecture and layering of services over base level W3C protocols, which may eventually lead to extension or additional layers of W3C protocols.

Then use Doug Engelbart's model linking Knowledge Product (systems of record), Dialog (systems of engagement), External Intelligence (email, public Web, other social businesses) as examples. And Traction TeamPage. Published in the Jam with with links of course!

See Seamless integration can work like the Web - in the W3C Social Business Jam.

Reinventing the Web

Extending the fabric of work, or How to Be Emergent

Fixing Enterprise Search

Intertwingled Work

Introducing Online Workplaces - Greg's notes on Larry Cannell's July 2011 Webinar

20 June 2005 | Supernova | Why Can't a Business Work More Like the Web?

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Traction Software's Greg Lloyd and Jordan Frank will be at Enterprise 2.0 Santa Clara Booth #208 15-16 Nov 2011. We hope to see you there! Traction Software will announce pricing and general availability of new Social Enterprise Web and Attivio Plus options, see Jacob Morgan's Chess Media Group review and Traction Software on Connected Work.

TeamPage's Social Enterprise Web option gives you freedom to add a Task tag, comment or share pages you find on the public Web or your company's intranet. You can add a badge or TeamPage comment widget with one line of Javascript. Or share, task, tag and comment on any Web page using TeamPage's free Web browser extension for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

TeamPage’s Attivio Plus option fuses TeamPage and External Systems of Record to work like the Web

TeamPage integrates search and discussion. Tag, task, and share content stored in SharePoint, email in Exchange, Documentum, File servers, SQL Databases, the public Web, private intranets, and other sources.

Don't miss Greg Lloyd on Tony Byrne's panel Marketplace Choices: Platform vs Products panel, Tuesday 15 Nov 2:30-3:30pm. Greg will join Oracle, Moxie Software, and Microsoft representatives in a lively discussion. Be our guest and Register with priority code CPHFES22 for a free Expo Pass, or save $500 on full conference registration. See us at the conference, or follow @TractionTeam on Twitter for TeamPage news you won't want to miss! To schedule a meeting with Jordan or Greg at E2.0 Santa Clara, please email e20santaclara@tractionsoftware.com, use Traction Software's contact form, or shout out to @TractionTeam on Twitter.

Conference Details This year's Enterprise 2.0 Santa Clara conference is at the Santa Clara Convention Center, 14-17 Nov 2011. Traction Software will be at Expo Pavilion Booth #208 from noon through 6:00 PM Tuesday and Wednesday. Register with priority code CPHFES22 for a free Expo Pass or save $500 on full registration. The Expo Pass entitles you to attend keynote and free sessions, visit the Expo pavilion, and free cocktail receptions from 4:00 to 6:00PM Tuesday and Wednesday. See you there!

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Writing in KMWorld Magazine Judith Lamont quotes Forrester Analyst Rob Koplowitz: "Many companies are placing a big bet on collaboration to support their business activities. In particular, the workplace is moving toward one in which many business applications are integrated through collaboration and exposed through the social layer." Lamont chooses Teampage customer the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative (BGRI) as her first example. BGRI is an international research project funded by the Gates Foundation and others to organize and conduct research aimed at stopping the spread of crop disease that threatens a third of the world's wheat supply. "The organization selected TeamPage from Traction Software as the collaboration solution and the Attivio Active Intelligence Engine (AIE) to aggregate the many types of content on the website. TeamPage includes wiki, blog and social networking capabilities. "We chose TeamPage because it could be deployed very quickly and was simple to use," says John Bakum, webmaster for the site, which is hosted by Cornell. The site was up and running in just a few weeks, and has grown rapidly over the past several years."

One of the first steps taken was to provide the community with information that had been scarce or expensive. "We arranged with the publisher of the Wheat Rust Atlas to put a PDF version of the book on our site," Bakum says. "The book was out of print but was a valuable resource, and now it's available to all the researchers."

The website helps expedite the administrative aspects of conducting research. Forms to request screening for wheat rust or dispatching seeds that may be resistant to the disease are available on the website, for example. "If a lab in Canada has a variety of wheat that may be resistant, researchers can send it to nurseries in Ethiopia and Kenya, where it can be grown and tested. Our website acts as a central place for that data, benefiting researchers around the world," Bakum explains."

Because members upload files into collaboration workspaces via e-mail, some content arrives in the form of attachments. "Attivio searches Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets and other types of files, even if they are attachments," Bakum says. Much of the site is public, but TeamPage allows for the creation of internal spaces that are password protected, to enable private virtual meetings.

» Read the full story

See also Borlaug Global Rust Initiative
19 Nov 2010 | Borlaug Global Rust Initiative Wins 2010 Forrester Groundswell Social Impact Award

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Ada Lovelace Day celebrates the contributions of women in science and technology. I've chosen to write about Betts Wald who was a branch chief in the Communications Science division of the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) when I first met her. I joined NRL in 1974 as my first real job - after serving in the US Army when I was drafted as a graduate student at Brown. It was a great experience. NRL was full of wildly talented, energetic and brilliant managers who knew how to get impossible things done in engineering and government, and taught that skill to their teams. Betts was one of the best: leading and inspiring her team, running interference, providing just enough technical guidance (i.e. to avoid permanent damage) while constantly encouraging and developing her team's talents. Women in science and technology should be encouraged to consider career paths as leaders as well as individual contributors: Betts is a great role model. Although I never heard Betts shout: "To the difference engine!", except for the pipe it would be in character. And I'm not certain about the pipe.

Note on the Ada icon: I strongly recommend that you download the thrilling adventures of Babbage & Lovelace for your iPad, and see author Sydney Padua's excellent 2D Goggles site.

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"I’ve seen the Traction product a few times now I have to say that I really like it and not just for small and medium size businesses. Traction offers an amazing search integration feature which many large vendors can’t even come close to replicating." Chess Media Group Principal and author Jacob Morgan just started a weekly series of concise, consistent, and even-handed public reviews of vendors in the emergent collaboration / Enterprise 2.0 space. Traction Software is honored to chosen for the second review in Jacob's series. Jacob asks wide-ranging questions on overall direction, along with practical questions on integration, support, pricing, maintenance, time to go live, technology, focus, capabilities, customers, key differentiating factors from competition, along with Jacob's candid take.

Jacob continues: "I think their approach to using search as the backbone behind collaboration is also very unique, in fact they are the only vendor that I have spoken to which highlights search and discusses it in such an integral way. I like the focus of not having to integrate various systems together which requires duplicating and then syncing content but I also wonder how deep the search functionality can go into things such as billing and invoicing systems, service request systems, or ERP/CRM systems. The platform itself is very intuitive and easy to use, everything extraneous seems to have been removed but without compromising the UI or the functionality of the platform. I also think their pricing model is also quite attractive." » Read Jacob's full review and Greg Lloyd's comment.

See Connected Work
Related Traction Software Introduces Social Enterprise Web

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KMWorld 2011 Panel C303 2pm-2:45pm Thur Nov 3, 2011. Join Traction Software's Jordan Frank and a stellar panel from the FDA, Attivio, and Deloitte to discuss and debate the future of social software in the enterprise, how it relates to what you see and use on the public Web, and how it differs. Expect a lively discussion based on practical experience, research, and analysis. “We want Facebook for the enterprise!” That’s a call to action, but what does it mean, and why will it fail? There is a gulf of difference in the use case for 2.0 in the Enterprise vs. the Web. Deloitte research indicates the best starting point for E2.0 is exception management, not making friends. Permissions issues, incentives, and infrastructure differ enormously when you consider the enterprise vs. the web. Enterprise architects and decision makers need to look at the web to gather ideas but not to look in the mirror.

Panel
Jordan Frank, VP, Sales & Business Development - Traction Software
Sid Probstein, Chief Technology Officer - Attivio
Paul Fisher, Senior Policy Advisor - FDA
Marcelus DeCoulode, Strategy & Operations - Deloitte Consulting

More on this session. Please contact us to meet Jordan and panel members during KMWorld 2011 and learn about new Attvio Plus and TeamPage Social Enterprise Web capabilities.

See KMWorld 2011 Nov 1-3 Washington Marriott Wardman Park, Washington DC.

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Athens Group is an independent consulting firm based in Houston, Texas. In 2009, the company migrated their Athens Group Quality Management System (AGQMS), industry knowledge base, and training curriculum to Traction TeamPage where the information is easily accessed, collectively edited, and the content can be moderated where necessary. TeamPage became their integrated Intranet. In 2011, the TeamPage Attivio Search Module was added to further improve information access with automatic page ranking and faceted drill down navigation.

Using TeamPage, Athens Group is able to quickly and cost-effectively train a greater number of Drilling Technology Assurance℠ (DTA) consultants, enabling the company to provide its DTA services to a rapidly growing client base. The Traction TeamPage based Intranet streamlines management of AGQMS and allows anyone in the company to gain quick and easy access to Athens Group quality procedures and documents.

About Athens Group

Athens Group provides independent, third-party technology assurance services for high-specification Oil & Gas drilling and production systems. Our mission is to help operators, drilling contractors and asset owners ensure safety, reduce non-productive time (NPT), and safeguard the environment over the entire asset lifecycle.

Before Traction TeamPage

In 2009, Athens Group was faced with the need to scale its training and quality management systems to accommodate its rapid growth. Traction TeamPage helped the company to:

• Consolidate AGQMS for more streamlined change management and greater internal visibility
• Keep up with the demand for its services by enabling new hires to more quickly remove any gaps in their knowledge, become well versed in the Athens Group proprietary Proven Practices, and become productive DTA Consultants

Benefits of Traction TeamPage

“No, really, we want you to edit our intranet first day on the job.” Thomas Cogdell, the Knowledge Coordinator at Athens Group, usually gets a disbelieving look when he tells this to a newly hired Drilling Technology Assurance℠ (DTA) consultant. “We believe that you bring experience, knowledge, and perspective that will improve our knowledge management systems. And don’t worry, our TeamPage software ensures I’ll get an email notifying me of a change to any page; and it keeps full history so we can always roll back if need be; and it locks down some tightly-controlled spaces like AGQMS so that you won’t be able to make changes where you shouldn’t. So … we really do want you to edit our intranet!”

This oft-repeated conversation highlights three reasons why Athens Group selected Traction TeamPage over competitive systems:

• Ease of editing by anyone in the company
• A full audit trail of all changes
• Ability to have a mix of open and moderated spaces

The ability to export collections to Word and PDF, subscribe to pages and spaces, and use keyword tags were other important features for the fast-growing company.

Less than a year after implementation of the company’s Traction TeamPage based Intranet, adoption has been rapid, as shown in the following graph.

By building its company Intranet using Traction TeamPage technology, Athens Group has been able to:

• Consolidate disparate sources of company knowledge into a single portal
• Streamline its training and knowledge management processes

Athens Group Quality Management System (AGQMS)

The Traction TeamPage deployment of AGQMS was designed and implemented under the auspices David Wight, the Director of Quality for Athens Group, who has designed several ISO-certified quality systems. After AGQMS was migrated to Traction TeamPage, it moved from a bulky set of processes, procedures, work instructions and documents to a highly visible and easily customizable Intranet system that's known and used by everyone at Athens Group.

The AGQMS space’s home page is a comprehensive home page on the Intranet, with links to top-level articles:

Athens Group chose to make AGQMS a moderated space, creating an audit trail of approvals as well as edits. For example, this page shows both the Edit and Moderation history of one page:

Using the tagging capabilities in TeamPage, each page is assigned an owner and an approver. This gives each person an easily accessed “to-do list.”

Athens Group Knowledge Portal

As a consulting services organization, accessibility to corporate knowledge is a core value that Athens Group provides for its clients. Athens Group leveraged TeamPage's tag-driven sections to create an Athens Group Knowledge Portal that's both comprehensive and self-maintaining.

To aid knowledge transfer, Athens Group created its own taxonomy of industry keywords. Late-generation drilling rigs have their own vocabulary and acronyms, and the same company or piece of equipment can be known by more than one. For example, a top drive (which drives the drill bit into the well) might be referred to as “Top Drive”, “TD”, “T.D.”, “Derrick Drilling Machine”, “DDM”, or “D.D.M.” – often in the same document! Rather than have to search for all the possible combinations, Athens Group created a single tag “Top_drive” which is then applied in every place where the top drive is referenced.

Similar tags for clients, vendors, operators, rigs, and so forth enabled creation of section driven pages that dynamically build themselves as Athens Groups adds new clients, rigs and projects to its ever-expanding list of successful delivery of DTA services. For example, in addition to links to external sources such as Rigzone, each rig page in the knowledge base has dynamic lists of projects for that rig, lessons learned from working on that rig, and other references to the rig anywhere in the Intranet.

These lists are self-maintaining, because any time a new project or lesson learned or other page is tagged with the rig name, TeamPage will automatically update the list.

Traction TeamPage’s ability to use tags and dynamic sections has resulted in a highly cross-linked, yet zero-maintenance knowledge portal.

DTA Training Curriculum

The increasing demand for Athens Group’s DTA services created the need for scalability in the training process. Once AGQMS and the Knowledge Portal were implemented in TeamPage, Athens Group moved from a paper-based training curriculum to an online curriculum that references other parts of the Intranet.

The DTA Training space implements this approach and has greatly improved the scalability of Athens Group’s training program. A newly hired DTA Consultant works through the Training Curriculum which guides him or her through the entire multi-week process.

Each of the training pages may have links to many other spaces, such as AGQMS, Company Info, or DTA Proven Practices. Training pages may also include links to network shares such as the DTA Knowledge Base℠, other Athens Group online systems such as OpenAir, or external resources such as the Driller’s Club message boards.

New hires who are seasoned veterans from other leading companies in the industry have consistently say that the Athens Group Intranet, quality system, and training program is the best they've ever seen. And they're surprised to learn that they're expected to contribute content immediately, even on the first day! Once assured that their changes will be reviewed and can be reversed, they do.

The Future of Traction TeamPage at Athens Group

Athens Group’s Traction TeamPage based Intranet allowed the company to better leverage its AGQMS system and reduce the training time needed before DTA consultants are ready to be assigned to projects. As Athens Group continues to expand its services, clients and employees, Traction TeamPage will prove its value again and again.

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