How to create a simplified custom front page for TeamPage

The other day, I helped a Japanese IT Support company build a client support site with TeamPage.

Their main request was to make the top page ("front page") of TeamPage simple as possible to be more welcoming and prevent clients from being confused. So, I (1) put the large icons and buttons on the top page and (2) removed tabs and sidebar etc.

In this blog post, I will briefly introduce how I did the customizations using a TeamPage plug-in developed and delivered to the company.

How? Why TeamPage?

Let me introduce how TeamPage allow us to build a client support site with private and public spaces.

A "space" is like a "room" in a TeamPage building. An administrator is like a janitor of the building. He or she creates private rooms for clients who purchase IT support services from the company. The TeamPage server also has spaces for internal staff, and public spaces to post information shared with all clients and internal staff.

• A client can not enter the private rooms for the other clients.
• Internal support staff including the administrators can enter all rooms.

For example, the support requests, on-site remedy schedules, and the other articles and comments posted in the "Client A" room are allowed to be viewed by Client A only. They can not be seen by the other clients.

On the other hand, the internal staff has a high level overview of everything.

The company decided to start using TeamPage to build their support site because they had found Teampage as the best tool to manage the information security, track the latest situation for all clients, and research support records posted in the past by search.

Why We Simplify The Top Page

The top page before customization had the following interface.

• There were 3 green buttons, "Inquiry Form for PC", "Request via Phone", and "Request via Email".
  • The buttons were embedded in an article and I put the article on the top page.
• The blue button "Go To Members' Page" was supposed to lead a client to his/her private space.
• The New Articles section showed the 5 newest article so that people could catch what was going on quickly on the top page.
• The Customer Information section showed the 5 newest articles with the "Customer Information" tag so that the internal staff can take a look quickly on the top page.

I thought this was simple enough and sufficiently refreshing, but my customer wanted me to simplify more and more. Their requests were;

• Let the clients understand "Go to the membership page first" and do not allow them to do other operations on the top page.
• Add attractive graphics including a fancy character. The top page with text and buttons does not look inviting and may turn off the clients.

TeamPage has lots of links and buttons on the page. This allows people to select their favorite ways to do an operation. One of them may do something by selecting a tab in the top navigation bar and another may do the same thing by clicking a link in the sidebar.

It's designed to be flexible. However, my customer didn't like it. He said "If there are several ways to get the same goal, people may be confused to choose one. They need only one way. Remove the unnecessary links and buttons as possible from the top page so that there will be only one way to get to the members' page."

I think this might be because of the difference of the educations in the U.S. and Japan. I've heard that the kids in the U.S. are taught to be independent, have their opinions, and make decisions. On the other hand, the kids in Japan are taught to follow the others to be a part of the teams first rather than express their opinions. Interesting, isn't it?

How to customize

Okay. Now let me introduce how I simplified the top page and made my customer happy.

Hiding the unnecessary parts

First of all, I had to hide unnecessary tabs and buttons as much as possible. Please see the animation shown below. I hid the black parts.

Home icon on the top-left

The "home" icon for returning to the top page is unnecessary on the top page because you are supposed to be already on the top page. I hid it by using the following stylesheet (CSS).

.view-home #loc .loc-home {
  display: none;
}

The stylesheet can be set on the "Design" dialog or Proteus Custom JavaScript & CSS plug-in.

Setup and Invite menus

The "Setup" menu shows up only when a user logs in to TeamPage as an administrator. Since clients who post inquiries are not administrators, this menu will not be displayed. Therefore, customization is unnecessary.

The "Invite" menu shows up only when a user logs in to TeamPage with a user account with the "Invite" permission. This permission is allowed to everyone by default, so I configured the permission is allowed only to the administrators.

Tabs

The tabs in the header bar is a frequently-used navigation In TeamPage. You can switch the tabs by your needs. For example, if you want to the tasks and/or projects of your team, you should select the "Tasks" tab. If you want to check the due dates of the tasks and/or your meeting schedules, you should select the "Calendar" tab.

The tabs may be unnecessary for clients who are not familiar with TeamPage, but they are convenient and powerful navigation for those who are accustomed to TeamPage (such as administrators).

So, I decided to set up "to hide the tabs for clients and display the tabs for administrators".

The plugin-in that I recently created for this purpose is Set Special Class(es) to The HTML Body Tag plug-in which checks whether a logged-in user account belongs to a specific group and adds a special class(es) to the HTML <body> tag.

I set it up to add class="is-admin" to the <body> tag if a logged-in user belongs to the administrator group.

This allows me to display the tabs to the administrators only with the following stylesheet.

body:not(.is-admin) #sect-nav {
  display: none;
}

Sidebar

Hide/Show Side Column plug-in, which is installed by default, has an option which allows users to select collapse (hide) or expand (show) the sidebar by default. All I had to do was selecting "hide by default" there.

Sections

I disabled the sections in [Server Settings] > [Front page] configuration page. It was easy.

Coloring the notification badge

The notification badge tells you the number of your notifications. You receive a notification when someone comments on your post, someone changed the status of your task, someone posts an event (a schedule) with you as an attendee, and so on.

... but I wanted the badge to be noticeable by making its color red. The default color is lightened color of the background bar. Don't you think it is inconspicuous?

It was also easy to color the badge red. Just add the following CSS.

.menu-notifications .notifications-count {
  background-color: crimson;
}

A Fancy Character

I asked a web designer in the IT Support company to draw an image of the top page with a fancy character. Now, how do I put it on the top page of TeamPage?

TeamPage has (1) the "Embed Content" plug-in which allows me to put any HTML code in an article and (2) the "Dashboard" capability which allows me to display a specific article(s) on the top page. With the combination of the (1) and (2), I thought I could achieve the goal.

However, it turned out that there was a problem. Putting the green buttons and menus in the picture above is OK because the link target is fixed and the same for everyone but the destination of the "Members' Page" (the blue button) in the picture below must be different per client.

The "Members' Page" means "the dashboard page in the client's private space". So the blue button must navigate a user from the client "ABC Company" to the "ABC" room ("ABC" private space) and a user from the client "XYZ Company" to the "XYZ" room etc.

So I created a special small plug-in that checks the private space of a logged-in user and put the space name into the destination URL.

Each client user is supposed to have the read permission in his/her private space and some public spaces. The plug-in gets the list of the spaces where the user has the read permission and exclude the public spaces from the list.

<!--- Create a comma-separated list of the spaces where the user has the read permission,
      and put it into the "readableSpaces" variable. -->
<var.set name="readableSpaces">
  <projects.read>
    __project.name__
    <loop.last not>,</loop.last>
  </projects.read
</var.set>

<!--- Create a list of the public spaces
      and put it into the "publicSpaces" variable. -->
<var.set name="publicSpaces">Bulletin,FAQ,Forum</var.set>

<!--- Check each space in the list.
      If a space is in the public spaces list, do nothing. -->
<foreach list="${readableSpaces}">
  <compare.contains "${publicSpaces}" "__foreach.current__">
    <!--- Ignore! -->
  <else>
    <!--- Draw the blue button. -->
    <a href="/traction#/dashboard&proj=__foreach.current__">Members' Page</a>
  </compare.contains>
</foreach>

The programming language for TeamPage customization is called "SDL" (Skin Develop Language). It looks like HTML and XML. You can modify the existing behaviors and create new features just like you create a web page. If you are interested in the SDL programming, why don't you come to our support site? It's free!

After customization

Ta-da! Finally, the top page customizations are done.

The IT Support company liked the simplified face of the top page. "It is quite simple and easy to understand! Customers will not get lost any more."

Summary

On the standard front page of TeamPage, you can arrange sections such as "New Articles" and "New Tasks" like a newspaper, or you can put a specific article on it like a poster.

In addition, you can change the landing page from the front page (the team-shared dashboard) to your own page.

Using JavaScript, CSS, and TeamPage's SDL programming language makes it possible to further customize.

The TeamPage plug-in architecture makes it simple to install the customization, and allows the company to install new TeamPage updates without having to re-install the plug-in.

One of the IT Support company said: "It was surprising and inspiring to me to know that TeamPage has such wonderful flexibilities and possibilities. I asked you many requests and you did never say "No, it is not supported." All our requests came to existence. Wonderful!" I was so glad to hear that!

If you are interested in customizing TeamPage, please feel free to contact us. You can learn to do this customization yourself, ask us for TeamPage SDK training and support, or ask us to design, deliver and support a plug-in extension to match what you want to do.

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The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style ... A work graph consists of the units of work (tasks, ideas, clients, goals, agenda items); information about that work (relevant conversations, files, status, metadata); how it all fits together; and then the people involved with the work (who’s responsible for what? which people need to be kept in the loop?).

お客様が迷わない！スッキリ簡潔なトップページのカスタマイズ例 Japanese language version of this blog post, on the Traction Software Japanese Business Office website. Follow @TSIJPBO on Twitter for TeamPage news from Japan!

Aug 2018 | TeamPage ISO 9001:2015 Solution adds integrated Risk and Improvement Project Management

TeamPage 2018 Summer Release TeamPage's 9001:2015 Quality Management solution - developed in partnership with impi! Solutions - adds integrated Risk and Improvement Project management, tracking, and reporting capabilities. This release also adds: Advanced Japanese language search; improved type-ahead search; improved built-in search; many product and developer SDK bug fixes and improvements.

ISO 9001:2015 Quality Managment

Improved TeamPage ISO 9001:2015 support adds Risk and Improvement Project management to Non-Conformance and Corrective Action management, tracking, and reporting to deliver a broader, integrated ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management solution. Two TeamPage customers who tested the pre-release ISO 9001:2015 update previously used TeamPage to manage their quality documentation including Standard Operating Procedures, Work Instructions and Related content and were very happy with that - their auditors were very happy too. Both previously used Microsoft Word documents for Non-Conformance and Corrective Action Reports, and Excel spreadsheets and macros to track NC's and CA's.

The ISO 9001:2015 specification includes new requirements for risk-based thinking as well as an improvement program. Risk and Improvement replace the concept of Preventive Action in the former ISO 9001:2008 specification. With the new requirement, customers have the opportunity and motivation to re-think their current practices. TeamPage relates NC and CA reports to SOPs and also relates Threats to SOPs. From there, Risks relate to Threats. The risks are scored and, as necessary, mitigated with innovations and improvements. Both pre-release customers liked the quality-specific article types and tight relationships included in the TeamPage ISO 9001:2015 solution; both upgraded to the new solution. They said that this will save time managing and reporting on the status of their NCs, CAs, Threats, Risks and mitigation activities. One customer described the improved TeamPage ISO 9001:2015 solution as "Perfectly fitting our needs". The ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management solution leverages TeamPage's unique Work Graph Model to integrate quality documentation, action tracking, reporting based on the business process improvement model created by impi.

The TeamPage ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management Solution is packaged as a family of integrated Quality Management, Standard Meeting, and related plug-in extensions and templates, along with expert support to help your product or service organization work better, see ISO 9001:2015 Requirements Met By impi! Solutions. Please contact sales@tractionsoftware.com if you're interested in trying out this solution.

ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management Examples

Other highlights

• Solr based TeamPage Advanced Search is now available for use with Japanese language articles and files. The new Solr configuration includes Japanese language tokenization rules.
• Type-ahead completion and suggestions in TeamPage search and forms now uses Advanced Search when that capability has been installed and enabled. Queries using quotation marks to express phrase are now supported.
• Improved background memory cleanup and garbage collection performance.
• Improved private draft support and snippet generation for very large TeamPage articles, where each article may contain tens to hundreds of pages of content.
• Improved TeamPage behavior with external defined TeamPage accounts (e.g. a Microsoft Active Directory server) when an invalid account security principle encoding is encountered.
• Improved NTLMv2 logging and diagnosis of failed login attempts.
• Added statistics gathering for open file resources; improved statistics gathering for attachment save operations.
• Updated Apache Derby server version to 10.14.2.0.
• Improved performance of "Completed Tasks", "Total Tasks", and "% Tasks Complete" calculation for project and milestone reporting.
• Improved Task Table performance.
• Updated SDK support for handling fine-grain permission to erase specific versions or all versions of an entry.
• TeamPage's web forms SDK framework now supports an "html" pseudo-field type. This makes it easy to include possibly dynamic arbitrary markup in a form. Making it a field on the client side means that it can be set up to be dependent upon one or more other fields in the form, which means that the markup can be updated when a field change. SDK support for new event types for auto-refresh, entry-update, comment-insert, comment-update, comment-save and related events.
• Improved SDK entry filtering support.
• Improved Project Management and Status SDK entry type class definitions.
• New SDK Snippet tag for flexible generation and use of snippet text derived from entry text, external search engine content or other sources.
• Improved SDK search result Highlighter tag with simplified API.
• The release also includes many other bug fixes and general improvements. See TeamPage Change Log for a detailed list of changes in this and intermediate point releases.

Related

Meeting ISO 9001:2015 requirements using TeamPage and the impi! model The organization steadily builds its very own Wikipedia, and it’s ISO 9001 compliant. The risk of deadwood documentation is reduced: team members create their own documentation, hyperlinking contextualizes the documentation and tagging and search capability ease retrieval of information.

Why, How and What of the impi Standard Meeting Plug-in for TeamPage A short video demonstration and customer interview of the impi! Standard Meeting plug-in for TeamPage (part of the ISO 9001:2015 solution).

Quality Management, Signature Requirements Introducing TeamPage Quality Management and Signature Requirement capabilities.

The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style Understand how TeamPage connects people and their work.

A Fabric, not a Platform Making work actionable as well as observable: Objects, context, conversation, connection.

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Mar 2018 | Question and Answer plug-in and other TeamPage improvements

TeamPage 2018 Spring Release includes a new Question and Answer plug-in that make it simple to add Q&A capabilities to any TeamPage solution. You can also introduce a dedicated Q&A space to support a forum connecting any combination of external customers, partners and internal team members.

Other highlights

New section editor support for choosing a custom sliding time slice "Last [N] [Days | Weeks | Months | Quarters | Years]". Previously, there was only a choice between "All Time" and tracking the time slice for the containing page. Sections and section tables that have custom configured time slices also now have text that indicates the exact date range covered so that it will be clear to users what they're seeing. More highlights

• Integration of a new version of Google Web Toolkit (GWT) to resolve several layout problems introduced by new versions of Google Chrome;
• Rich text editing updated to use the latest release of TinyMCE;
• Custom transformers based on the open source htmlcleaner library can now be used to normalize and clean up incoming email and other sources before being posted as TeamPage entries;
• Fixed a script injection vulnerability associated with certain HTTP request parameters;
• Improved Active Directory integration; improved SDK support for custom EntryClass moderation;
• SDK now includes 'form-field-value-change' events to allow creation of custom event listeners that add special user interface behaviors for particular form field values;
• Performance improvements for TeamPage's optional CRM module;
• Caching performance improvements for large TeamPage journals.
• The release also includes over 60 bug fixes and general improvements. See TeamPage Change Log for a detailed list of changes in this and intermediate point releases.

Question and Answer examples

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Question and Answer Form Set plug-in Configuring the and using new Q&A capabilities. Japanese version 質問箱プラグイン

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Dec 2017 | FullCalendar adds list and schedule views, ability to show calendar events for selected groups

TeamPage 2017 Winter Release includes integration with FullCalendar to add new calendar views and capabilities including: list and agenda views; the ability to display events from Google Calendars; the ability to show individual calendars for people who belong to a selected group. FullCalendar is a customizable and open-source JavaScript event calendar with many extensible capabilities and a popular API.

Other highlights

A new Copy action used to create an editable duplicate of an existing entry; a much faster HTML-to-plaintext converter used to render snippets; updated NTLM libraries for single sign-on support; updated Adobe Derby JDBC connectors; improved type-ahead completion used to show relevant suggestions as text is typed in the TeamPage search box; improved external search engine integration, administration, and performance; new and improved developer SDK support for extending or overriding behavior of custom entry types and EntryClasses; new JavaScript functions used to extend and customize the TeamPage Proteus skin; colorful setting panel styling. The release also includes over 90 bug fixes and general improvements. See TeamPage Change Log for a detailed list of changes in this and intermediate point releases.

FullCalendar examples

Related

FullCalendar plug-in Configuring the and using new FullCalendar capabilities.

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Nov 2017 | TeamPage 6.2 Major Release

TeamPage 6.2 is a major release which packages changes and improvements that have been incrementally delivered to cloud-hosted and on-premises customers. In addition to bug fixes and improvements, highlights of this release are updates to API's used by developers to extend TeamPage, and substantial internal refactoring to improve the structure of the TeamPage code base.

Release Highlights

• New features and capabilities based on impi! Solutions partnership include a new a Threat and Opportunity module. The Threat and Opportunity module helps businesses identify, document, and handle risks posed by threats to business processes. A risk can be linked to innovation tasks to mitigate that risk, or to an improvement opportunity that is tracked and managed as part of an improvement project.
• Improved handling of auto-logged replies to TeamPage email notifications.
• Configurable project tracking tables can show the number of complete tasks or percent completed.
• Improved document relevance boost can use the number of incoming or outgoing cross-references, tags, the size of the entries discussion thread, number of updates, entry type, and other metrics to score relevance and return relevant results for any query.
• Improved Table of Contents widget (customer contributed) is now part of the TeamPage supported baseline.
• Improved interactive tooltip shows the title of the project or milestone associated with a Calendar event.
• Updated Public SDK API includes: new built-in sorting capabilities; improved flattened thread and sub-thread queries; configurable dynamic updates to form fields; form support for multi-level dialogs; support for required fields; regular expression support for list type matcher; support for numeric field types; relevance boost can now show an explanation of scoring to help understand why a result appears where it does in a list of search results.
• TeamPage SDK extensions and improvements support new TeamPage plug-ins and plug-in solutions developed by Traction Software, Traction Software's Japanese Business Office, partners, and customers.
• Many specific bug fixes and performance improvements, see TeamPage 6.2 Change Log for details.See TeamPage Change Log for a detailed list of changes in this and intermediate point releases.

Related

Why, How and What of the impi Standard Meeting Plug-in for TeamPage A short video demonstration and customer interview of the impi! Standard Meeting plug-in for TeamPage.

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Meeting ISO 9001:2015 requirements using TeamPage and the impi! model The organization steadily builds its very own Wikipedia, and it’s ISO 9001 compliant. The risk of deadwood documentation is reduced: team members create their own documentation, hyperlinking contextualizes the documentation and tagging and search capability ease retrieval of information.

The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style Understand how TeamPage connects people and their work.

A Fabric, not a Platform Making work actionable as well as observable: Objects, context, conversation, connection.

@TractionTeam Highlights - Curated tweets by TractionTeam

Why, How and What of the impi Standard Meeting Plug-in for TeamPage

The new impi! Standard Meeting Plug-in for TeamPage enables easier, faster and more accurate minute taking for recurring meetings which agenda is standardized. It augments the impi! solution: Goal Alignment - Mini Business Units Deployment. To learn more about this plug-in and impi's Business Management System solutions built using TeamPage, please contact Traction Software.

The task is the unit of continuous improvement and the MBU meeting the delivery forum

In a Lean enterprise, the unit of continuous improvement is the task or action. It needs to be explicit and time bound. Members make themselves accountable by first agreeing on the tasks and then taking responsibility to carry them out. The best forum to review progress is the mini-business unit (MBU) meeting where accountability is achieved with transparency and simplicity. This is one of the reason why visual management is much prevalent in Companies seeking excellent processes and people. At operational level, a wall is well suited to communicate priority tasks and decisions. Together with Key Performance indicators and other succinct and essential information, the priority tasks are recorded on a board. The traditional supervisor black book is now replaced with an information medium available to all. The interval between two meetings is short (from a shift to a week) and the priority tasks are straight forward. The meeting is recurring and its agenda is standardized: there isn't a need for minute taking.

Visual management is not restricted to a wall. TeamPage provides electronic visual management

However, for MBUs where the nature of the standard meetings is more systemic or strategic, tasks become more complex and numerous. Decisions need to be recorded too. Even general information and detailed minutes can be needed. This is typical with cross-functional operational meetings, management reviews, monthly executive or sales meetings, multisite meetings where new information and intelligence are shared. An electronic solution is required. Here, the wall, board and pens are replaced with the screen, projector and computer; this is still visual management.

The Standard Meeting Plug-in leverages the capability of TeamPage for task management and contextualizing information. Our development drive has been to offer a solution that would be intuitive, easy to use and offering simple and deep ways of finding historical tasks, decisions, and minutes. Additionally the ability to see at one glance all historical decisions associated to a particular meeting profile, provides a coach insight into the chairperson management style.

The plug-in is a productivity tool and a time saver

We researched examples of minute taking templates (some of them very complex in the Quality Assurance domain) and observed for two years the habits at CounterPoint Trading our industrial partner with whom we experiment all impi! solutions. We came to the conclusion that the five following areas were sufficient to document a standard meeting:

1. The administrative information that identifies the standard meeting e.g. meeting name, location, attendees, etc.
2. The Meeting profile that describes the 4 P's (Purpose, Players, Preparation and Plan - the agenda)
3. General Information or Detailed minutes
4. Decisions made during the meeting
5. Open and closed tasks from the current meeting and open tasks from past meetings.

The resulting solution allows the team to capture on the go tasks and decisions associated to the meeting profile. Past open tasks are always on the radar screen, thus reinforcing accountability. Information retrieval is immediate in the context of the meeting. The plug-in is a productivity tool and a time saver. Example of usage of the standard meeting plugin would be for management and senior management meetings, project reviews, management reviews, compliance/governance meetings, multisite meetings, etc.

CounterPoint Trading interview

Here are the first impressions on using the plug-in from the original users at CounterPoint Trading:

How does it work?

A standard meeting is defined by its 4Ps. impi! users define the detailed meeting profiles in their Knowledge Central space alternatively the 4Ps will be defined in the meeting profile article created in the relevant space.

A standard meetings section is configured In MBU spaces (e.g. BU3 operational) or special purpose spaces (e.g. Environmental Management).

By adding a meeting profile in the meeting section, we create a container where all the meeting minutes will be collected in sequence for that particular profile

We can navigate from to the previous and next meeting directly from the current minutes. Also, a new meeting minutes can be created In the Meeting profile itself or alternatively from the latest meeting minutes.

Open tasks from past meetings are shown in the current meeting minutes

Learn More

Here is a more detailed tutorial on how to use the Standard Meeting plug-in:

Related

Introducing impi! - Pierre Bienvenüe - founder of impi Business Improvement Solutions Pty

Jun 2016 | ISO 9001:2015 Requirements Met By impi! Solutions - Meeting ISO 9001:2015 requirements using the impi! model

impi! What's in the name? What's in the logo? - Discipline and creativity

Dec 2016 | Business Process Improvement with impi!, Plug-in extensions, TeamPage improvements

Dec 2016 | Business Process Improvement with impi!, Plug-in extensions, TeamPage improvements

TeamPage Winter 2016 Release Consolidates point releases shipped since May 2016, adding numerous improvements to support business process, quality management, daily report, and other plug-in extensions. This release also includes new user experience and performance improvements, bug fixes, extensions of the TeamPage SDK, and architectural enhancements to extend the capabilities of the TeamPage platform.

Business Process Improvement with impi!

Traction Software has teamed with impi! Solutions to create a family of business process improvement solutions that use TeamPage as a platform for planning, support, management and improvement of business and quality management processes, with a particular focus on processes aligned with ISO 9001:2015. See Why, How and What of the impi Standard Meeting Plug-in for TeamPage for a short video demo and customer interview.

All impi! solutions are built on TeamPage on a wiki space and are standard documents. Every solution starts with a Policy (the why) and a Standard Operating Procedure (the how). The SOP is the hub that links all the other documents (the spokes). The templates used for these documents are the same that the client can use for their own controlled documentation in their own wiki space called “Knowledge Central”. Two outputs of every improvement projects are a) an operational improvement and b) documentation in Knowledge Central. The project templates used to run improvement projects comprise standard articles that will naturally become elements of the BOP (e.g. SIPOC, business process maps). When the project leader reaches the Control or Adjust part of the project, large chunks of the documentation would have been written. Using the capability of TeamPage simplifies the linking and tagging of documents. The organization steadily builds its very own Wikipedia, and it’s ISO 9001 compliant. The risk of deadwood documentation is reduced: team members create their own documentation, hyperlinking contextualizes the documentation and tagging and search capability ease retrieval of information.

Several templates are available for improvement projects (e.g. PDCA, DMAIC). With each project milestones are associated standard articles e.g. project charter, project checklist, Fishbone diagram, business process “AS IS". For each milestone there are also associated tasks. In each task is a tutorial on its own with tips and links to glossary terms, One Point Lessons (e.g. How to use a risk assessment matrix) or external reference in the public domain, e.g. Wikipedia, Lean Institute.

Impi! Solutions and its consulting partners offer Business Process Improvement services to help guide successful introduction, management, and improvement processes by mentoring and working as members of their client's TeamPage based solutions rather than walking away after presenting a big consulting bill, and coming back to pick up the pieces six months or a year later. By working alongside their clients in the same TeamPage system, impi! partners can remotely monitor activity, recognize potential problems or opportunities, answer questions, work through issues or problems, and provide guidance that's both effective and affordable, particularly for small to mid-size organizations.

Contact Traction Software to learn how impi! Solutions can help your business succeed.

Daily Report and other plug-in extensions

Traction Software's Japanese Business Office works with TeamPage USA and customers and partners around the world to define, develop, and deliver plug-in extensions to Traction TeamPage. TeamPage extension range from customer specific specialization of general purpose TeamPage Task, Project, and Dashboard forms and views to a growing range of mini-applications that work as a native part of TeamPage. These extensions leverage TeamPage's plug-in runtime extensible architecture to selectively override or add behavior and properties to the base TeamPage model, making it simple to maintain plug-in's across TeamPage releases.

For example, Traction Software's Japanese Business office launched a dedicated DailyReports.biz site and solution for the Japanese Daily Report 日報 practice. In some Japanese companies, at the end of each day employees are expected to write a summary of what they did and submit it to their boss. This is called a "日報" (daily report or daily journal) and is traditionally used to share information between employees and bosses. Rather than adding a chore at the end of each day, the new Daily Report solution makes it easy to share a short note after a talk with a customer, when a task is completed, or after some other noteworthy event. The note is easy to post using a phone, tablet, or desktop computer and is shared in with others in real time. The note is also automatically included in a summary email digest at the end of the day, see DailyReports.biz (Japanese).

Daily Reports can include tasks, scheduled events, meeting notes, photos, and Customer contact notes using an extensible CRM form on desktop or mobile devices. Team members as well as bosses can share notes, plans, and a Daily Report calendar of events.

iPhone Daily Reports

Daily Report is offered as a dedicated solution in Japan, see DailyReports.biz for a live demonstration site, pricing, feature summary, and frequently asked questions (all in Japanese). Google Chrome's automatic translation works well for reading the DailyReports.biz site and demonstration in English - on mobile as well as desktop devices. In Japan, please contact DailyReport.biz for more information.

In US and other markets, please contact US sales if you're interested in using the Daily Reports solution, or for information about free TeamPage community extensions, mini-applications, or customer specific extensions tailored to exactly what you need.

Other Release Highlights

• Improved Social Enterprise Web Comment and Task forms

• Improved Section Table widget editor

• Updated Japanese localizations

• Finer grain control over what events appear in your Personal Calendar

• New "Assigned to Me" and "Notify Me" filter options for Task Lists and other views.

• Updated version of TinyMCE rich text editor

• Support for SHA-2 algorithms for Certificate Signing Requests (CSRs)

• New "Indexing Mode" setting controls how Premium search tracks and dispatches new and updated documents

• Improved support for Microsoft Edge browser

• Social Enterprise Web. The hover menu for individual files (either in a single file view, or in external search engine results) now includes a "describe" item that will allow a user who has permission to do so to create or edit an entry that contains an authored description of the file.

• Many "under the hood" improvements to the part of the Traction SDK that cover integration with external search engines, with the goal of making external search engine features more reliable. The Traction SDK external search integration API (mostly contained in the com.traction.sdk.search package) has undergone extensive changes.

Related

Why, How and What of the impi Standard Meeting Plug-in for TeamPage A short video demonstration and customer interview of the impi! Standard Meeting plug-in for TeamPage.

Jul 2016 | TeamPage Real Time Daily Report 日報 (Japan)

Jun 2016 | ISO 9001:2015 Requirements Met By impi! Solutions

May 2016 | TeamPage Mobile App, Improved Document Management

Dec 2015 | Quality Management, Signature Requirements Create, distribute, manage, and improve procedures to deliver high-quality products and services to your customers

The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style Understand how TeamPage connects people and their work

A Fabric, not a Platform Making work actionable as well as observable: Objects, context, conversation, connection

@TractionTeam Highlights - Curated tweets by TractionTeam

Jul 2016 | TeamPage Real Time Daily Report 日報 (Japan)

Traction Software's Japanese Business office launched a dedicated DailyReports.biz site and solution for the Japanese Daily Report 日報 practice. In some Japanese companies, at the end of each day employees are expected to write a summary of what they did and submit it to their boss. This is called a "日報" (daily report or daily journal) and is traditionally used to share information between employees and bosses. Rather than adding a chore at the end of each day, the new Daily Report solution makes it easy to share a short note after a talk with a customer, when a task is completed, or after some other noteworthy event. The note is easy to post using a phone, tablet, or desktop computer and is shared in with others in real time. The note is also automatically included in a summary email digest at the end of the day, see DailyReports.biz (Japanese).

Daily Reports can include tasks, scheduled events, meeting notes, photos, and Customer contact notes using an extensible CRM form on desktop or mobile devices. Team members as well as bosses can share notes, plans, and a Daily Report calendar of events.

Daily Report is offered as a dedicated solution in Japan, see DailyReports.biz for a live demonstration site, pricing, feature summary, and frequently asked questions (all in Japanese). Google Chrome's automatic translation works well for reading the DailyReports.biz site and demonstration in English - on mobile as well as desktop devices. In Japan, please contact DailyReport.biz for more information.

Traction Software doesn't currently market a dedicated Daily Report solution in other countries. For US and other markets, please contact US sales if you're interested in using the Daily Reports solution.

Related

「書かない日報」ソリューションの特設紹介サイトをオープン - Press release (Japanese) 1日の出来事や成果をまとめた日報は、コミュニケーション促進や情報の共有に役立つのは確かです。しかし、「日報としてまとめて書く」ときに、大切な情報が抜け落ちたり、書くことが負担となることも少なくありません。

Daily Report 日報 = Observable Work: Takashi Okutsu - About the Daily Report practice in Japan.

Eat your spinach: Email is good for you, but it could taste a lot better - ホウレンソウ (HORENSO) has a literal English translation "spinach", but it is used to refer to a Japanese practice that aligns members understanding and synchronizes actions.

impi! What's in the name? What's in the logo?

Impi is a Zulu word for any armed body of men. It also bears in English a connotation to the art of warfare. In the early part of the 19th century the Zulu nation, then a relatively small tribe rose to a prominent nation. Under the leadership of King Shaka its influence span across Southern Africa. Shaka deeply transformed the art of warfare in the sub continent drawing from traditions and innovating. Aspects of warfare covered army structure and deployment, leadership, training, agility, logistic, weaponry, etc. Shaka's organisational development and leading of his impis were characterised by discipline (standardisation) and creative improvement.

Shaka's influence in improving the impi was sustained to the point that 71 years after his death, at the battle of Isandlwana in 1879, the numerically superior Zulu impi defeated the British despite a vast disadvantage in weapons technology. "The British Army had suffered its worst defeat against an indigenous technologically vastly inferior foe." (See Wikipedia article).

Relevance to our project

impi! as a set of solutions offers a disciplined and structured approach to establishing the Business Management Systems (ISO 9001 compliant) of organisations based on continuous improvement. It relies on the transformation of individuals that become a thinking people by improving processes through discipline and creativity.

So if an organisation and its employees constitute an impi, who would be the enemy? The various risks associated to operating a business and the wasteful activities embedded in the processes are the enemy. And it goes on: the age-grade regiments are the MBUs; the Bull-Horn formation is part of the management systems; the shields are the standards used to protect; the spears are the methods used to improve (problem solving, innovation, improvement projects) i.e. atrophy the risks and eradicate problems.

Reference to Lean principles

Social Structure and Technical Structure of an organisation as per Paul Adler (1999).

A stunning observation of the evolution of the impi under King Shaka is the level of innovation and creativity stemming from the cultural traditions and the simultaneous increase in discipline. In the Lean manufacturing approach, leadership intentionally develops a thinking people on the foundation of strong structures and standards.

A common view of organisational structures is to look at discipline and creativity as the two ends of the same structural continuum. Jeffrey Liker in a footnote of the Toyota Way (2004) makes reference to Paul Adler's paper on Building Better Bureaucracies (1999). Adler's model shows that creativity (enabling Social Structure) and discipline (strong Technical Structure) are two favourable features of an empowered organisation. The Intern (2015 film) makes an interesting point in the balance between discipline and creativity (although the critics would have missed in the movie the case for enabling bureaucracies).

Long before we started building the blocks (the solutions) for impi! in 2012, we wanted to lay a foundation: a dynamic model that would help understand how a customer driven company operates. Business Management Systems are constructs designed to manage knowledge. In the words of Peter Drucker, "the essence of management is to make knowledge productive". The Core Cycle is an integrated model that attempts to make the statement actionable. It consists of five interrelated factors namely: contribution, best operating practice (BOP), best improvement practice (BIP), leadership and structure, and empowerment.

Back in 2005, the author became a champion for the implementation of a continuous improvement programme. He created the ancestor of the Core Cycle as a theme to communicate the change about to happen in the organisation. It consisted in a shield representing the discipline in the organisation and a spear representing innovation or improvement. With the shield, one can defend. In the case of the organisation, this means defending a business model, people, environment, shareholder value. But an organisation that only defends systems defined in the past cannot sustain without improvement: attacking to craft a future for the organisation by continuously improving. Improvement and Discipline have been identified as success factors of the impi.

Defending with the shield; attacking with the spear.

The evolution from this picture to the Core Cycle happened over the years. The shield became the Best Operating practice (BOP) and the spear became the Business Improvement Practice (BIP).

Rooted in our values

As we develop a relationship with our clients, partners as well as a nascent Community Of Practice, we hope to strengthen our values and live by them:

• We care relates to the protection offered by the shield. We care for others, the business model, the systems and processes, shareholder value, etc.
• We Continuously Improve relates to the spear and carving a future for impi!, our partners and clients.
• We Contribute by defeating the enemy: risk and waste (value addition).

Revealed in the impi! logo

The impi! logo below represents the i of impi! and the exclamation mark; continuously spinning, like Deming's wheel, the PDCA cycle. We standardise, improve and sustain, like King Shaka did with the impi.

And by the way, why an "!" at the end of impi! ?

Because the impi is powerful, compelling and exciting. Listen to Johnny Clegg, relating the battle of Isandlwana in his song impi!

Related

Introducing impi! - Pierre Bienvenüe - Concepts impi! uses to build business management systems. Convergence of Quality Assurance and Continuous Improvement.

ISO 9001:2015 Requirements Met By impi! Solutions - ISO 9001:2015 requirements based on lessons learned working with one of my clients since July 2015 under the guidance of one of the contributors to the new version of the standard.

A Fabric, not a Platform

Apple and Google are competing to build a fabric that connects everything you own and use, working outward from the globally meshed supercomputer you carry in your pocket. Both apply deep learning technology to AI assistants, and are opening up their AIs and bots to other apps, bots, and cloud services. This richly connected fabric makes bots useful and AI assistants valuable by teaching them how to identify objects you're talking about as well as understand what you want done. The same applies at work. Making this happen requires a shift from the traditional definition of a platform to a fabric which makes it possible to connect people and the actionable objects they use, in context.

Juggling Plates

First of all, work is not all done in one place. The things that people talk about and use to get work done are scattered across a handful of silos and apps. For some people it's a scary, dark forest of silos and apps, but most people rely on a handful of places to get their daily work done - and are reluctant to venture outside the places they know.

This isn't a bad thing:

• Nothing is ever done in one place; work is intrinsically intertwingled. People will use their own smart phones and apps to route around omissions and ugly bumps that IT provides.
• Trying to stuff all work into one big box is much, much worse: I remember the global bank whose Lotus Notes repositories spent almost all of their cycles synchronizing with each other.
• In a competitive marketplace, progress is made in fits and starts. New apps, platforms and services are far better, cheaper and more fun to use than apps fossilized by IT for a small captive, internal audience, written and maintained by the lowest-cost outsourced bidder.
• It's an opportunity for companies like Salesforce and others to build big service platforms to create cozy places for familiar activities, lowering friction and adding guardrails for guidance.
• Sharing platforms like Box, Dropbox, and Google also aspire to become platforms for work, trying to convince customers and developers to choose their platform to build cozy places for specific activities.
• But having a multitude of channels repeats the plate juggling problem if you have too many places to look when you try to get organized, see Group Chat Doesn't Suck. The Way We're Using It Sucks

How can we make work actionable?

Actionable Work

I hope you all agree that one way to make life easier for people trying to get work done together is to make their work observable. I believe it's also valuable to make work actionable - by individuals, teams, apps, bots, and AIs. Think "actionable" in the sense of actionable intelligence: "information that can be acted upon, with the further implication that actions should be taken." Think "work" in the sense of "work product" like tasks, documents, CAD files, transactions in system of record, as well as the trail of actions taken and resources used by people, apps, or bots to get work done.

In an ideal world, the information you want, things you need to work with, and people who you should talk with should be just a click - or a "Hey Siri" - away. I'll call this actionable work since it expresses a desire to make what you or others have done, used or talked about in the past usable to get work done in the future. Effortlessly findable. Easily usable. It should fall readily to hand. How close can we come to the ideal? What's needed? What stands in the way?

Objects - Documents, pages, messages, tasks, discussions, and transactions need to be findable, addressable, and usable as objects of action verbs, whether than verb is an action taken using a click, API call, message to a bot, or request to an assistant like Siri.

Context - To make work actionable, you need to implicitly or explicitly identify the context of an action's reference; context itself becomes an object of actionable work.

Although this sounds like something that only a programmer would say, think about how you reference objects in a conversation: "How are we doing on the Acme Products proposal?" A human being you work with either has a pretty good idea of what you mean in some shared context, or will ask you a question to clarify.

A good reply might be "We're waiting for Chris. He should approve it or get back with questions by Wednesday close of business". Could a bot do this? Even if you're not using a bot, could a request like "How're we doing on the Acme Products proposal?" give you a link to the relevant status and related activity rather than just a link to a document named Acme Proposal?

Software objects have addresses or names that can identify that object in the context of some open domain like the web or a closed domain like a database. Although some objects of actionable work have human sensible names, few of these names are unique. Unique names are themselves unique in a context like names in your address book, names in corporate directory, or assigned names like invoice numbers and permalinks in a system of record. Many objects of actionable work don't have human sensible names, but become addressable when a click on a screen or command like "reply" enables a software system to identify the object you want to act on.

Work Graph - Whether shown on a screen or mentioned in a relevant context, context makes objects of actionable work findable, usable, and fall readily to hand. By "fall readily to hand" I mean easily accessible to human beings who talk about related objects of work. People, bots, and AIs need to understand what humans means when they say "Send this to Jordan and see if he agrees", or "Open a trouble report on this." Building on a term coined by Justin Rosenstein, l call this representation of related people, objects and trails of actions in context a work graph.

Work like the web - You don't need to get into arguments about the world of apps versus the work of the web so long as the underlying objects you use are addressable and usable with standard W3C protocols. It doesn't matter if you use Facebook's mobile app or Facebook's web browser interface so long as both user interfaces show and use the same objects and content under the covers on the server side. You also want to: 1) identify yourself once, and use that identity consistently; 2) rely on web services to consistently grant or deny access and other permissions based on that identity; 3) rely on web services for actions, permission-aware search and navigation throughout an interoperable fabric.

We're close to this basic interoperability using nothing more than a web browser, web standards, and web addressable services. See the Internet Archive's 2016 Decentralized Web Summit and my two cents in Reinventing the Web II

A Fabric, Not a Platform

Traditionally, "platform" refers to a software product with APIs used to construct or extend applications and services, like the original version of Lotus Notes. With the advent of the web, service business like Salesforce, SAP, and others began opening up their cloud platforms to entice builders to add complementary capabilities that "work like Salesforce" etc.

Sharing services like Box and Dropbox began opening up their platforms to enable apps as well as people to share documents and handle closely related activities. Likewise Slack is building out its messaging platform, adding bot and message button extensions to use external services from within Slack, and connectors to enable sharing and other services to use Slack for messaging.

Platform wars - The fact that all of these services are available via the cloud makes a basic level of W3C-based interoperability possible, if not exactly easy or pleasant. It's plate juggling time, even for organizations that try to stuff all of their work into the same box. Customers, partners, and employees find it's even easier to use their phones and favorite services to route around what's missing or awkward to use at work. The good news: market pressures are driving platform builders to compete on their ability to connect and interoperate with complementary or competing services.

At the same time, the shift to mobile first drives adoption of bot and AI conversational interfaces since: 1) there's no room to show a long list of results or screens that look like an old fashion airplane cockpit on a mobile screen; 2) people aren't willing to put up with the clutter; 3) people feel comfortable with a conversational interface that reliably understands what they want done and asks for clarification or confirmation when appropriate. A great conversational interface requires a good way to model context, whether the conversation is driven by text messages, voice, or a sequence of screens.

I believe what's needed is a fabric for actionable work that lives over traditional cloud platforms and services. Not one big box where all the work gets done, but a thin layer of pages, messages, and trails of activity using identity and a work graph to enable people, bots, and AIs to understand what people want to do, how to find the right objects, and how to do it.

Transactional and other work done inside a system of record or a selected service platform will still be done using that platform, linked from the actionable objects in the work graph using standard W3C links or vendor API services.

For example, TeamPage offers social enterprise web capabilities (summarized below) that automatically index the content of any external web reference, and make that page an actionable object which can be discussed, tasked, tagged, and searched from within TeamPage. A simple browser plug-in or single JavaScript call planted on an application page can add a TeamPage discussion box (similar to Disqus) and tasks to web pages representing orders, CAD designs, and other objects in an external system of record.

TeamPage permissions make it easy to define who can see and use actionable objects, expressed in the context of a business activity like Quality Management. Customers, partners and employees build a shared fabric of actionable work, relying on TeamPage to clip references to related work that's more private than they're permitted to see.

The work graph and its actionable objects are the right resources for bots and AI's to learn how to make what you care about effortlessly findable, easily usable, and accessible to bots and AI's you trust. Hey Siri - how're we doing on the Acme Products proposal?

Related

A Fabric, not a Platform

From The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style

"...A work graph consists of the units of work (tasks, ideas, clients, goals, agenda items); information about that work (relevant conversations, files, status, metadata); how it all fits together; and then the people involved with the work (who’s responsible for what? which people need to be kept in the loop?).

The upshot of the latter data structure is having all the information we need when we need it. Where the enterprise social graph requires blasting a whole team with messages like “Hey, has anyone started working on this yet?”, we can just query the work graph and efficiently find out exactly who’s working on that task and how much progress they’ve made. Where the enterprise social graph model depends on serendipity, the work graph model routes information with purpose: towards driving projects to conclusions." Justin Rosenstein, Wired 9 Oct 2013

TeamPage Work Graph

TeamPage watches what you do, and automatically maintains two-way links and relationships as you edit, keeping an accurate version history of everything so you can easily see what changed, when, and who did what.

TeamPage's work graph automatically connects articles, comments, status messages, tasks, milestones, projects, links, shared references, and relationships stored in TeamPage to the TeamPage profile of the person who created, edited or tagged the work, along with a time stamp for the action.

This concept of a work graph is helpful in describing what TeamPage automatically creates and maintains as you work.

But what counts is how TeamPage uses its work graph model to cut clutter, make it much easier to work with people anywhere inside or outside your organization, and make files and records already in IT systems easily accessible to get work done.

The same work graph information is organized and presented two different ways: by person, or by unit of work. This enables TeamPage to show activity feeds, dashboards and calendars of people, linked to the work they created or edited, as well as activity feeds, dashboards, and calendars for specific tasks, projects, and spaces where many people work together.

Working with external and internal teams - use permission rules to clip what the work graph lets you see

TeamPage's work graph model includes permissioned access that automatically clips content to show just those work items, relationships, and search results each person is allowed to read.

This makes it simple to use TeamPage for work that can cross boundaries, linking customers, suppliers, partners and internal teams with different permissions to different business activities on the same TeamPage server.

TeamPages' work graph model allows you to put a private comment (or task) in a more private space where it's only visible to a smaller group. For example, an internal team discussion on a customer's question.

Typically each external client has a private space (like separate clients of a law firm), and internal team members have a birds eye view across all clients and most or all internal spaces. TeamPage makes it simple to set up granular access rules for spaces based on individual names, Active Directory, LDAP, or TeamPage group membership.

Extending the work graph to content on the public Web, Intranet pages, and siloed systems of record.

TeamPage's Social Enterprise Web enables you to share, tag, task or comment on any page your browser can see on the public Web or on your private intranet. Just install TeamPage's Web browser plug-in extension for modern browsers including Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

The Social Enterprise Web also lets you add a TeamPage share button (like Facebook or Google+ share buttons) or comment box (like Disqus) to any public or intranet Web page your organization controls. Comments are stored in TeamPage , and link back to the external Web page, which is treated as part of the TeamPage work graph.

As a bonus, the content of a page linked to TeamPage with the browser plug-in, share button, or comment box is automatically indexed for TeamPage search and drill down navigation.

The Social Enterprise Web makes pages on the public Web or your organization's intranet simple to see, share, find and connect to TeamPage tasks. A task or question on an internal purchase order page can tracked and used part of TeamPage's work graph without complicated or expensive custom integration.

For example, add a TeamPage comment box to an Purchase order page in a Web based ERP system by adding a JavaScript snippet, and see something like this:

You can then search, share, task, tag or comment on any work item in these external systems, making live external transactions part of your TeamPage work graph, including integrated TeamPage and external content analysis, search and navigation.

More

Reinventing the Web II (2014) Why isn't the Web a reliable and useful long term store for the links and content people independently create? What can we do to fix that? Who benefits from creating spaces with stable, permanently addressable content? Who pays? What incentives can make Web scale permanent, stable content with reliable bidirectional links and other goodies as common and useful as Web search over the entire flakey, decentralized and wildly successful Web? Includes links to the 2016 Internet Archive Decentralized Web Summit and other resources.

Continuity and Intertwingled Work (2014) A level above an Internet of Things: Apple aims to deliver a seamless fabric spanning what's in your phone, tablet, car, and home, for you, your family, and trusted services at work.

Google::Apple is the new Microsoft::Apple (2016) A two player race between the most valuable and capable enterprises on earth. "It could be ML/AI/NLP/Cloud is new OEM licensing Achilles heel, as one example? Conversely, did Android inherit ecosystem fracturing? @stevesi" "IMO only Google and Apple have a sufficiently well-connected fabric of personal information, mobile platform, apps. @roundtrip'' An annotated Twitter conversation with links to Google and Apple fabric references.

Contextual Computing At Work (2013) Peter Morrison argues that the future or work isn't mobile, it's contextual: "Always-present computers, able to sense the objective and subjective aspects of a given situation, will augment our ability to perceive and act in the moment based on where we are, who we’re with, and our past experiences. These are our sixth, seventh, and eighth senses."

Intertwingled Work (2010) No one Web service or collection of Web servers contain everything people need, but we get along using search and creative services that link content across wildly different sources. The same principle applies when you want to link and work across widely diverse siloed systems of record and transactional databases.

Enterprise 2.0 and Observable Work (2010) Jim McGee wrote: "One unintended consequence of today's technology environment is to make the process of knowledge work less visible just when we need it to be more so. The end products of knowledge work are already highly refined abstractions; a financial analysis, project plan, consulting report, or article. Today, the evolution from germ of an idea through intermediate representations and false starts to finished product exists, if at all, as a series of morphing digital representations and ephemeral feedback interactions." We need to make work observable.

Jun 2016 | ISO 9001:2015 Requirements Met By impi! Solutions

Impi! founder Pierre Bienvenüe shares his analysis of ISO 9001:2015 requirements based on lessons learned working with one of his clients since July 2015 under the guidance of one of the contributors to the new version of the standard. He uses the impi! model to document mappings from sub-clauses of the impi! solution model to ISO 9001:2015 requirements, and from ISO clauses and sub-clauses to solution capabilities.

Pierre writes: "Since July 2015, I've had the privilege to contribute to the ISO 9001:2015 implementation at one of my clients (my official guinea pig!) under the guidance of one of the contributors to the new version of the standard. impi! has proven itself to be a solid and flexible platform to work through the implementation and manage the required documentation. As a result, the current impi! solutions are supportive of the new standard."

"All impi! solutions are built on TeamPage on a wiki space and are standard documents. Every solution starts with a Policy (the why) and a Standard Operating Procedure (the how). The SOP is the hub that links all the other documents (the spokes). The templates used for these documents are the same that the client can use for their own controlled documentation in their own wiki space called “Knowledge Central”. Two outputs of every improvement projects are a) an operational improvement and b) documentation in Knowledge Central. The project templates used to run improvement projects comprise standard articles that will naturally become elements of the BOP (e.g. SIPOC, business process maps). When the project leader reaches the Control or Adjust part of the project, large chunks of the documentation would have been written. Using the capability of TeamPage simplifies the linking and tagging of documents. The organisation steadily builds its very own Wikipedia, and it’s ISO 9001 compliant. The risk of deadwood documentation is reduced: team members create their own documentation, hyperlinking contextualises the documentation and tagging and search capability ease retrieval of information."

"Of course we apply this model to definition and development of our own impi! solutions! I'm happy to share my mapping of imp! Solution clauses to ISO 9001:2015 requirements - and the inverse mapping from ISO 9001:2015 to imp! solution clauses. This is a living document that guides definition and development of TeamPage solutions developed by impi! and Traction Software."

Pierre Bienvenüe is founder of impi Business Improvement Solutions Pty, a South African business improvement firm and TeamPage solution partner since 2012. See Introducing impi! for contact information and background. See Quality Management, Signature Requirements for more about Traction Software's Quality Management option. Please contact us for Quality Option details.

Solutions application ⇒ ISO 9001:2015 reference

ISO 9001:2015 reference ⇒ solutions application

Related

Introducing impi! - Pierre Bienvenüe - Concepts impi! uses to build business management systems. Convergence of Quality Assurance and Continuous Improvement.

Dec 2015 | Quality Management, Signature Requirements - The TeamPage Quality Management module adds Feedback, Non-Conformance, and Corrective Action forms and dashboards to TeamPage's standard support for authoring, delivery, and tracking of quality and compliance documentation

TeamPage Solutions: Quality Management - Author, version, and share quality procedures using TeamPage

Introducing impi! - Pierre Bienvenüe

I'm happy to introduce Pierre Bienvenüe, founder of impi Business Improvement Solutions Pty, a South African business improvement firm and TeamPage solution partner since 2012. Pierre has great experience in helping mid-size companies organize and run effective quality improvement programmes. impi! works with clients as partners from concept definition, initial rollout, through improvement of the quality program itself. Pierre has worked with Traction Software and clients to develop templates, plug-in extensions, and a methodology for using TeamPage to support the impi! business improvement model, with solid results to report. This post is an introduction. You'll hear more from Pierre as an expert guest blogger on this page, in Traction Software's TeamPage customer forums (free registration), and across the web.

Pierre Bienvenüe writes: Since 2012, the trigger to develop impi! was primarily the realisation that mid-size companies couldn’t afford quality improvement programmes à la TRACC, 20-Keys, Mission Directed Workteam or BMGI offering. Furthermore, they didn’t want an improvement programme but needed a business management system (BMS). Something that would outlive the consultant… (btw they didn't want training either, but coaching.)

Additionally, for a few years now we have experienced the convergence of Quality Assurance and Continuous Improvement. The latter becoming the enabler of the former. Since July 2015, I've had the privilege to contribute to the ISO 9001:2015 implementation at one of my clients (my official guinea pig!) under the guidance of one of the contributors to the new version of the standard. impi! has proven itself to be a solid and flexible platform to work through the implementation and manage the required documentation. As a result, the current impi! solutions are supportive of the new standard.

Why choosing mid-size companies? Their systems are usually less mature than that of large corporations and therefore, the implementation of an IT system underpinning the BMS wouldn’t usually clash with legacy systems. Also, most importantly, top management in mid-size organisations are more likely to get their hands dirty coaching the teams (changing the nappies) rather than the consultant-nanny who too often ends up raising the kids by implementing the programme bottom-up (which always fails in my experience).

A few concepts to build a business management system

impi! is applying the Lean tools and techniques other programmes offer (and probably not as well due to my limited experience and resources to develop the content). However, there are a few concepts, possibly original, that I’d like to share with you:

1. Integration of document management and improvement, blurring the lines between creativity and discipline, short term operation and long term systemic improvement.

The question here is how to ensure that improvement results in standardisation and standardisation in sustainability. There is always a tension between moving fast in improving and taking time to properly document, train and even audit.

Another tension exists between the daily operation (immediate) and its systemic improvement (essential). Here, a footnote on the Toyota Way led me to Paul Adler's article: “Building better bureaucracies” (see also attachment) on enabling vs coercive structures. And gave me hope that discipline and creativity should coexist in the workplace.

My response to the two challenges is:

1. A dynamic business model, the Core Cycle, summarised by Drucker definition of management: “the essence of management is to make knowledge productive”. This model helps me to have an integrated view on how a business operates and therefore develop interlocking solutions to build its BMS. I attach a presentation of the Core Cycle, a subset of the foundation course I train my clients with;
2. A technology (social media for companies: TeamPage) as an enabler of the Core Cycle that provides an integrated work environment, flexibility, ease of use and at the same time provides structure and visibility. With the technology we can have knowledge workers and even supervisors to collaborate, share, task, project manage, create and manage documents, etc.

I experimented and now understand that the technology - social media for companies (Enterprise 2.0) - and the philosophy - the Toyota half-way (see attachment) - share many principles: collaboration, transparency, accountability, emergence (pattern of improvement: pushing the knowledge threshold by doing).

• Adler - Building Better Bureaucracies
• Bob Emiliani - The Toyota Half-Way
• This presentation is designed for PowerPoint 2010. the core cycle model is animated, so don’t move forward too quickly: Core Cycle slides

2. Management needs to become a routine, implementing a routine is a project, starts at the top, everyone is responsible for improving the organisation. entrench the routine of change before planning to roll out at operational level. Rather than starting an improvement programme - typically with business goal alignment, we first need to build the structure for improvement.

I found that a two-weekly cycle of project review sets up a pace for the company and puts the right pressure on both top management and project leaders. I borrowed that idea from a 6-sigma project management method.

Everyone with a computer runs an improvement project (initially) related to their processes. The project leader gets some face time weekly (20 to 60 minutes) with a sponsor (the process owner = top management). Every two weeks, project leaders stand up and give an account of progress before top management using TeamPage. This is show time. Coaching and learning naturally happens. Con artists are exposed. We get to eat together. We celebrate project closure. The improvement champion (internal or external) can use that time for short training time at the point of need (e.g. what the hell is the Toyota Kata? What is a Pareto analysis, how and when to use it?). The forum is also used to get the teams to contribute to the Long Range Planning process.

Then implementation of any system is pushed through that improvement process. It is logged and managed as a project e.g. establishing standard meetings, rolling out KPIs, ISO 9001 implementation, 5S and of course improvement of business and operational processes. So we guarantee alignment to strategic objectives and make the workload of project leaders obvious.

3. Mirror the social media spaces to the actual Mini Business Units (MBUs). Harmonious mix of electronic and manual visual management

We create spaces for the systemic, strategic and selected operational mini-business units. The more the team uses the platform for its daily operation for communicating and tasking, the easier it becomes to use it for project management and documenting: it is the same platform. A bonus feature is that email traffic diminishes. Visual management (e.g. KPI tracking) is still displayed on the walls, yet in some cases is duplicated electronically. Tasking and minute taking is captured live by the team members in the relevant MBUs. Knowledge can also be created in the context of daily activities with threaded discussions. The discussions are usually informal but they are searchable and can be tasked.

4. Use the BMS to provide knowledge

Sharing of knowledge is woven into the BMS. Firstly, in the central repository of standard documentation (Best Operating Practice - BOP), secondly in the project templates themselves (e.g. DMAIC, Business Process Improvement), thirdly in the MBU spaces as described in Para 3:

1. All impi! solutions are built on TeamPage on a wiki space and are standard documents. Every solution starts with a Policy (the why) and a Standard Operating Procedure (the how). The SOP is the hub that links all the other documents (the spokes). The templates used for these documents are the same that the client can use for their own controlled documentation in their own wiki space called “Knowledge Central”. Two outputs of every improvement projects are a) an operational improvement and b) documentation in Knowledge Central. The project templates used to run improvement projects comprise standard articles that will naturally become elements of the BOP (e.g. SIPOC, business process maps). When the project leader reaches the Control or Adjust part of the project, large chunks of the documentation would have been written. Using the capability of TeamPage simplifies the linking and tagging of documents. The organisation steadily builds its very own Wikipedia, and it’s ISO 9001 compliant. The risk of deadwood documentation is reduced: team members create their own documentation, hyperlinking contextualises the documentation and tagging and search capability ease retrieval of information.
2. Several templates are available for improvement projects (e.g. PDCA, DMAIC). With each project milestones are associated standard articles e.g. project charter, project checklist, Fishbone diagram, business process “AS IS". To each milestone there are also associated tasks. In each task is a tutorial on its own with tips and links to glossary terms, One Point Lessons (e.g. How to use a risk assessment matrix) or external reference in the public domain, e.g. Wikipedia, Lean Institute.

Finally, here is a one page summary of impi! and the synopsis of one of the three solutions that Traction and I have released thus far and are currently being used at clients.

Voilà - I hope there is enough meat here to stimulate a conversation or two.

Since I have only developed impi! thus far with my clients and for my clients, I haven't started a public website. It will be up this year. Immediately though, I will value the comments and interactions @Pierre on Traction Software's TeamPage server (free registration) or email pierre@impi.solutions. In the meantime, gazing a last time at the horizon of this South African part of the Indian Ocean, I'm aiming down to the engine room, pondering how I am to navigate this blue ocean.

Related

Jun 2016 | ISO 9001:2015 Requirements Met By impi! Solutions - Meeting ISO 9001:2015 requirements using the impi! model

impi! What's in the name? What's in the logo? - Discipline and creativity

Dec 2016 | Business Process Improvement with impi!, Plug-in extensions, TeamPage improvements

Why, How and What of the impi Standard Meeting Plug-in for TeamPage - A customer interview and walkthrough of one new part of the impi! BMS solution

Chris Nuzum Hyperkult XXV Video | Tripping Up Memory Lane

Watch this video of Chris Nuzum's Tripping Up Memory Lane talk at Hyperkult 2015, University of Lüneburg, 10 July 2015. Traction Software CTO and co-founder Chris Nuzum reviews hypertext history, his experience as a hypertext practitioner, and the core principles of Traction TeamPage.

Live video Christopher Nuzum: Tripping up Memory Lane Hyperkult XXV
Adobe Flash required for desktop Chrome or Internet Explorer 10 and earlier.

More

my posts | thoughtvectors.net

Related

Tripping Up Memory Lane - Chris Nuzum's written notes for his Hyperkult XXV talk.

Traction Roots - Doug Engelbart - About Doug Engelbart's Journal and Traction.

Original Traction Product Proposal - Hypertext roots and evolution of Traction TeamPage.

Doug Engelbart | 85th Birthday Jan 30, 2010 - "Doug Engelbart sat under a twenty-two-foot-high video screen, "dealing lightning with both hands." At least that's the way it seemed to Chuck Thacker, a young Xerox PARC computer designer who was later shown a video of the demonstration that changed the course of the computer world."

Thought Vectors - Ted Nelson: Art not Technology - "To give up on human understanding is to give up hope, what we call in English 'a counsel of despair.' I think there is hope for much better and more powerful software designs that will give ordinary people the power over computers that they have always wanted - power with complete understanding. But that requires inspired software design, which I believe is art and not technology."

The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style - The social dance of getting things done, dealing with exceptions, and staying aware of what’s going on around you

Introducing the TeamPage iOS App

I was delighted to find that our TeamPage iOS companion app was published on the App Store this morning. We've been enjoying the app for the past few months, and are excited finally to be able to share it with you.

A Simple, Useful Start

We've often thought about what we wanted in a mobile TeamPage app. Our ambition set a pretty high bar.

The app that we released today is not the app we thought we needed to build.

It's the app that we were tired of living without.

It has a simple objective: make it easy to stay in the loop when you're living your life away from your desk. So you can dash off a quick response while waiting in line for a coffee; read and respond to last night's posts on the train; or add an incoming request to your worklist before you turn off the light.

Two Views, for Two Ways of Dealing with Information

TeamPage provides dozens of ways to slice and present information: feeds and dashboards scoped to spaces, projects, and milestones; task lists; section tables; tag change and history views, cross-references and audit trails.

Desktop TeamPage, that is.

We boiled the mobile app down to two views: Notifications and Discussions.

Notifications are:

• Low volume, focused on what you care about and what you need to know.
• Great for responding to @mentions, seeing tasks assigned to you, following discussions you've participated in, and tracking activity on projects you own, spaces you subscribe to, and people you follow.
• Perfect for individual contributors, engineers, and people who prefer to work with headphones on, since it keeps the level of distraction to a minimum.

Discussions are:

• For when you want to, or need to, scan everything that's going on.
• Perfect for analysts, support staff, and managers who need to scan for activity of interest and either jump into the conversation or follow up in detail later.

Personally, if it's been a while since I checked in, I review my notifications first, and then scan through discussions.

The list view showing notifications and discussions uses a new unread tracking capability built into TeamPage and synchronized with the iOS application to give you a snippet of the next unread message in the thread, while showing you the avatar of the person who posted it.

The discussions and notifications views are ordered based on how recently the thread was active, so you only need to scan down the list until you've reached an item you've seen before to know that you're all caught up. The yellow highlight on unread items also helps with this, making it very easy to stay on top of what's new.

A New Detail View

The Desktop version of TeamPage uses nesting to visualize replies in context, which works very well for getting the big picture and for threads you haven't read.

In the app, to facilitate catching up on the latest additions, we organize the replies chronologically, and use the unread tracking to scroll you down to the next unread reply.

We also make it easy to swipe left and right or use left and right arrows to go to the next or previous thread in the list, which makes it very easy to catch up on activity using only one hand.

Two Actions, to Put Your Mind at Rest ⋮

When it comes down to it, when something comes to your attention on your mobile device, you either can deal with it then and there, or you can't.

If you just need to answer a question, you can use the Reply via Email action to type or dictate a quick reply.

If you need to come back to it later, you can add it to your Worklist, where it will show up on top when you get back to your desk.

And if you need access to the full TeamPage web interface, e.g. to assign a task to someone, you can open a browser to the current discussion by switching from the preview tab to the WWW tab.

Finally, you can use the Share Sheet to share a post's URL with other iOS apps.

That's It

For starters, anyway. We've focused on making it fast, functional, and friendly, while laying a foundation for future features. Behind the scenes, there's a new REST API on the server side; you can learn more about that in my next post, Behind the Scenes of the iOS TeamPage App. We'll be extending that API in concert with new features for iOS and other clients.

What's Next?

We welcome your feedback, ideas, and, inevitably, bug reports. We know our 1.0 isn't perfect, and it certainly isn't complete, but we find it indispensable, and hope you will too.

Depending on how you use TeamPage, you'll probably have a different opinion about what should come next. If you use it for ISO 9000 compliance or Quality Management, you might want to be able to compose new Quality Issues with photos right from the phone (today you can email them in). If you're a Competitive Intelligence professional, you might want access to Advanced Search. If you're a project manager, you might want to edit your project's tasks, or your team members' worklists.

Please send questions and feedback to ios@tractionsoftware.com, or post in the TeamPage Forum.

Note: The TeamPage app requires a TeamPage server version 6.1.14 or later. If you're a hosted customer, you're ready to go. If you have an on-premise TeamPage server, you'll need to upgrade before you enjoy the iOS app with your TeamPage server.

If you're interested in how we built the app, stay tuned for my next post, Behind the Scenes of the iOS TeamPage App.

May 2016 | TeamPage Mobile App, Improved Document Management

TeamPage Spring 2016 Release introduces: the first release of a new TeamPage Mobile App for iPhone and iPad; a new TeamPage Document Management user interface; the first release of a new JSON API for mobile devices, bots, and other external clients; improved external search engine integration; bug fixes, improvements, and other changes.

TeamPage Mobile App for iPhone and iPad

The free TeamPage app lets you review TeamPage discussions and notifications, tracks what you have read, and lets you add items to your worklist and reply via email. It also supports offline reading and replying to downloaded content. It's a handy way to keep up with activity in TeamPage using your iPhone or iPad when you're away from your desk. See TeamPage iOS Application and Chris Nuzum's blog post for details and examples. You can download the free TeamPage App from Apple's iOS App Store.

Improved Document Management Interface

TeamPage's document management interface has been revamped, and now supports a native move feature for moving files and folders.

Other Release Highlights

• Social Enterprise Web. The hover menu for individual files (either in a single file view, or in external search engine results) now includes a "describe" item that will allow a user who has permission to do so to create or edit an entry that contains an authored description of the file.

• The section table widget now supports sections driven by external search engine queies.

• The reset password view, which is used with the "Forgot your password?" feature that can be enabled on TeamPage's login form, now displays password requirements you've set, such as minimum length or minimum numbers of special characters. Previously, these requirements were shown in other contexts where TeamPage user account passwords are being chosen, but not on this page.

• Improved dashboard section RSS and Atom feed support.

• Documents page's network drive link is now easier to spot, and the accompanying help tip has been improved.

• Improved reporting and recovery from network errors such as intermittent internet connectivity problems.

• Upgraded the version of Java packaged with TeamPage to Oracle JRE 8u72.

• Improved support for the Microsoft Edge web browser.

• Fixed a bug that could prevent localizations of TeamPage's rich text editor for certain languages (including French) from being correctly loaded.

• Added support for Calibri font to the Proteus skin, as well as to the Print skin, and PDF export options.

• Fixed an issue that could prevent email notifications from being sent in certain situations when a user changed their locale.

Developer SDK

• In order to support external clients, such as mobile devices and chat bots, the first part of a new com.traction.jsonapi plug-in is now included in TeamPage.

• Many "under the hood" improvements to the part of the Traction SDK that cover integration with external search engines, with the goal of making external search engine features more reliable. The Traction SDK external search integration API (mostly contained in the com.traction.sdk.search package) has undergone extensive changes.

Related

Dec 2015 | Quality Management, Signature Requirements Create, distribute, manage, and improve procedures to deliver high quality products and services to your customers

Oct 2015 | Personal Worklists, Quick Forms Track and share what you plan to work on. It's easy to add, rearrange, organize, checkoff and share items on your personal worklist

July 2015 | TeamPage Live Task Lists Live task lists keep everyone in synch on order of execution as well as planned end date

May 2015 | TeamPage Bookmarks, interactive filters, and Japanese search improvement Focus on what matters to you

March 2015 | TeamPage 6.1 Burn-up charts, interactive tables, SDK extensions Better tools for understanding the big picture of a projects or milestones

Dec 2014 | TeamPage @ Mentions Bring any TeamPage item to someone's attention, bring them into the followup conversation

The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style Understand how TeamPage connects people and their work

Daily Report 日報 = Observable Work: Takashi Okutsu

Takashi Okutsu of Traction Software's Japanese Business Office recently posted an update to his Daily Report TeamPage plugin. Takashi writes: "In some Japanese companies, it is common to look back what an employee did in the day, write a summary, and submit it to his/her boss. This is called "日報" (daily report or daily journal) and it's a way of sharing information between employees and bosses in the hierarchy. If you are interested in the ways of business in Japanese companies, you may find this blog post interesting." This example of Observable Work is very simple to understand and use. Quality Management and other TeamPage solutions follow the same pattern. Update 18 July 2016: See DailyReports.biz for information about Traction Software Japan's new dedicated Daily Report solution, including a live demonstration, pricing, feature summary and frequently asked questions.

Takashi's plug-in adds a Daily Report form to post and edit daily reports, along with a Daily Reports tab that includes a feed view, summary table, calendar view, and optional ranking. In addition to making it simple for employees to post a daily report, each report can be discussed, emailed, searched, and used like any other TeamPage article. For example, a visit to a customer which includes a suggestion or identifies a problem can be tagged with a follow-up task pinned to the original report and person who reported it, easily tracked from start to finish.

Like other TeamPage plug-in extensions Takashi's Daily Report is packaged as a single file that can be uploaded and installed with one click. Plug-in extensions add or override TeamPage capabilities, add new tabs, views and new setup pages to configure the appearance and behavior of the plug-in. TeamPage extensions include localized resources so the same plug-in can support many different languages - Japanese and English in this example.

See Takashi's Daily Report Form post for screenshots and examples. For a free TeamPage Forum and support account click here.

Related

• Jul 2016 | TeamPage Real Time Daily Report 日報 (Japan): Traction Software Japanese Business Office releases dedicated Daily Report 日報 solution. See DailyReports.biz for a live demonstration, pricing, feature summary and frequently asked questions.
• 日報プラグインをリリース: Takashi's TractionSoftware.jp post on his Daily Report plug-in. View Google English translation.
• Eat your spinach: Email is good for you, but it could taste a lot better: Takashi explains the Japanese business practice ホウレンソウ (HORENSO) "... a way of information sharing by way of aligning members' understandings and synchronizing actions about changing circumstances that happen in and out of an organization."
• Quality Management: Document your processes; track risk and improvement actions; watch what's going on throughout your organization, and make your auditors smile.
• Enterprise 2.0 and Observable Work: "The right starting point is to simply make the flow of work more visible." Jim McGee
• The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style Understand how TeamPage connects people and their work.

TeamPage iOS Application

The TeamPage App connects to a TeamPage server and makes it easy to stay up-to-date with the latest activity in your TeamPage server. You can download the free TeamPage App from Apple's iOS App Store.

You can quickly scroll through and review your notifications and recent discussions in a clear and easy-to-read format optimized for mobile devices.

Articles that you read in the app are marked read in your notifications list, making it easy to manage notifications when switching between devices.

Using the context menu, you can add any article to your worklist or reply via email from within the app.

You can read, reply to, and add to your worklist even when you're offline; when you reconnect, your changes are synced back to your TeamPage server.

Features

The TeamPage iOS App provides TeamPage lets you to interact with your own TeamPage server.

• Unread tracking synchronized with TeamPage

• Add any entry to your worklist

• Reply via email to any entry

Discussions

• This view lists all the activity that you are allowed to see on your server.

• The most recently commented on discussions appear first in the list.

• The author, time, ID, and a snippet of the first unread comment are displayed in the list.

• When you open a discussion, the view scrolls to the first entry in the discussion that you haven't yet read.

Notifications

• Any articles to which you are subscribed or for which you receive TeamPage notifications appear in the notifications list.

• Notifications you read or delete in the mobile app are marked read or deleted in TeamPage as well.

Detail View

• There a toggle switch provided that switches from the discussion thread to the full live TeamPage web interface, allowing customers familiar with TeamPage access to the web interface, which is what they currently use on iOS devices. The toggle switch remembers its last setting, so if you prefer the live interface, you can stay in that interface as you switch between threads.

• Context menu lets you add an entry to your worklist or reply via email (incoming email support must be configured in your TeamPage server for this to work).

• Swipe left and right to visit the next or previous discussion.

About TeamPage

TeamPage is a powerful, hypertext-based collaboration platform used worldwide by customers in Consulting, Manufacturing, Education, and Government for Product Management, Business Process Management, Compliance Management, Knowledge Management and Collaboration.

Dec 2015 | Quality Management, Signature Requirements

TeamPage Winter 2015 Release introduces a new TeamPage Quality Management option. The Quality Management module adds Feedback, Non-Conformance, and Corrective Action forms and dashboards to TeamPage's standard support for authoring, delivery, and tracking of quality and compliance documentation. The new Quality forms and dashboards make it simple to manage the full life cycle for manufacturing, operations, and other procedures based on ISO 9001 or other compliance standards. Signature Requirements is a new capability which lets you require people to sign TeamPage articles either once or on a recurring basis. Signature Requirements can be used to collect approvals for publication, confirm that a document has been reviewed or a process followed, or for any other situation where a set of users and groups must explicitly acknowledge that they have reviewed an article. Signature Requirements is included with the Quality Management option, and is also available as separately priced independent option, please contact us for details.

Quality Management

The Quality Management module adds a Quality tab with Overview, Feedback Reports, Non-Conformances, CAPAs (Corrective and Preventive Actions), and Quality Calendar subtabs to any TeamPage Space. This makes it simple to set up separate Quality processes for different departments or use cases on the same TeamPage server - or just use a single Space shared by all of your teams.

The Quality Management module also adds new Feedback Report, Non-Conformance, and CAPA forms to TeamPage. These Quality forms work like specialized TeamPage tasks, with additional pull down and fill in the blank options used to classify, assign and track Quality related actions. Action tracking, calendar notification, history, search, personal worklist, email digest, and other capabilities work just like they do with standard TeamPage tasks. This enables you to not only track the status of Feedback, Non-Conformance, and CAPA items, but also to use TeamPage collaborative and action tracking capabilities to work with your team to diagnose the problem, come up with a solution, then implement and test the updated procedures - while keeping everyone on the same page. TeamPage streamlines and simplifies the compliance process for everyone.

By combining TeamPage authoring, delivery and tracking with Quality Management module reporting, you get a system that's easy for people to use to get their work done as well as a system that makes your Quality Management team - and auditors - very happy.

Feedback Reports, Non-Conformances, CAPA subtabs each include a dashboard view with burn up chart, pie chart summaries, and an interactive tracking table for the corresponding Feedback, Non-Conformance and CAPA forms. The sidebar shows the total number of tasks and sum of tasks times for all forms of that type, with a choice to show only open Tasks to include completed items. Click any segment of a pie chart to zoom in on items that match that filter.

The interactive Tracking table for each subtab lists the title and selected properties for items of that type. You can choose any of the form's properties to show as table columns, and sort by any column by clicking the column name. The items shown in the table drive the burn-up chart and pie charts for the corresponding dashboard view.

Click the Add or Update buttons to create or edit the corresponding form type. The CAPA form shown above includes pull down selectors for Initiator type, Issue Type, Location, Review Phase and more, along with auto-lookup fields to fill in the responsible person - or persons - and action dates.

Every organization will want to use its own values for pull down choices like Initiator type, Location and other fields. The Quality Management setup form lets customers who have appropriate permissions fill in their own choices for pull down options as well as selecting template articles that contain the default content for each type of form.

The Quality Management module is an extra cost option that is now shipping. The Signature Requirements module is included with the Quality Management option, please contact us to learn more.

Signature Requirements

TeamPage now has a separate module that supports managing signature requirements. You can require selected users and groups to read, approve, authorize, or certify that they have taken some action associated with or described in a TeamPage article.

You can schedule signature requirements to be completed by a specific date, and you can also set them to recur automatically, for example to help clinical staff fulfill the requirement to review certain Standard Operating Procedures on an annual basis.

The types of requirement supported are extensible, so you can easily add custom types. The system reminds everyone involved of upcoming and overdue digital signature requirements, and managers can see exactly who signed when—and who has not yet signed—broken down by person, group, document, or space.

For auditability, signatures track the exact version of the document signed, and if a document has changed since the last time you signed it, the system shows you the exact changes between the versions.

Signature Requirements is now shipping as part of the Quality Management option or as a standalone option, please contact us to learn more.

More about TeamPage Quality Management

TeamPage Solutions: Quality Management - Author, version, and share quality procedures using TeamPage

How to make your ISO Auditor Smile; And Make Your Professional Life Much Easier - A Swedish precision machined products manufacturer uses TeamPage for ISO/TS 16 948 certified manufacturing and ISO 14 001 certified Environmental Management. One day the ISO auditor paid a visit ...

Alcoa Tackles IT Projects and Compliance

Athens Group - Traction TeamPage for Quality Management, Training and Knowledge Base

Decagon Devices: Plans, Products, Projects, Procedures and ISO 9001 Quality Management

Other Release Highlights

Improved Unified Search

Type-ahead completion for unified search now supports "in-order" character-by-character matching for space and user names to make it easier to find thing even if you're not sure how to spell what you want. Tag names now offer type-ahead completion. User name and user display name type-ahead completion is now provided even for users who don't have full address book search permission. The algorithm used to show type-ahead suggestions ordered by search hit score has been improved.

Improved Password Management

When requirements are in effect for passwords for user accounts managed in TeamPage (e.g., minimum length or minimum number of special characters), a summary of the requirements will be displayed anywhere a user password can be set for either new or existing user accounts.

Developer SDK

Improved TeamPage GWT, SDK, SDL capabilities for creating and editing extended entry types. The new directory_users UnifiedSearchSource can now be used to query for users defined in any external identity server or servers that TeamPage is currently configured to use. The db.entries tag, which can be used as a way to iterate over journal entries based upon queries executed against externally defined database tables, now supports query result sets which include the same entry multiple times

Related

Oct 2015 | Personal Worklists, Quick Forms Track and share what you plan to work on. It's easy to add, rearrange, organize, checkoff and share items on your personal worklist

July 2015 | TeamPage Live Task Lists Live task lists keep everyone in synch on order of execution as well as planned end date

May 2015 | TeamPage Bookmarks, interactive filters, and Japanese search improvement Focus on what matters to you

March 2015 | TeamPage 6.1 Burn-up charts, interactive tables, SDK extensions Better tools for understanding the big picture of a projects or milestones

Dec 2014 | TeamPage @ Mentions Bring any TeamPage item to someone's attention, bring them into the followup conversation

The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style Understand how TeamPage connects people and their work

Nov 2015 | Traction continues to punch above its weight - Real Story Group

Real Story Group released the latest version of their Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software Evaluations Report with updated reviews of Google, Igloo, Jive, Liferay Social Office, Telligent/Verint, and Traction on Oct 26, 2015. Real Story Group analyst Kashyap Kompella writes:

Traction: With a fairly loyal customer base, Traction continues to punch above its weight. The company is finding interesting use cases for the TeamPage software particularly in the ISO / quality management space for manufacturing customers.

See Kashyap's blog post for other sneak peaks. Contact Real Story Group for a complementary vendor evaluation chapter and the full Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software Report.

Contact Traction Software to learn about new TeamPage capabilities and product solution packages for Quality Management, Compliance, and Continuous Improvement.

See also Real Story Group's Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software Reality Check H1 / 2015 quoted by Dion Hinchcliffe

The @realstorygroup's #socbiz software vendor breakdown is perhaps more useful however. #EnSw pic.twitter.com/4HIESstoh2

— Dion Hinchcliffe (@dhinchcliffe) November 18, 2015

Related

Dec 2015 | Quality Management, Signature Requirements

TeamPage Solutions: Qualiity Management

Alcoa Tackles IT Projects and Compliance

Athens Group - Traction TeamPage for Quality Management, Training and Knowledge Base

Decagon Devices: Plans, Products, Projects, Procedures and ISO 9001 Quality Management

How to make your ISO Auditor Smile; And Make Your Professional Life Much Easier

Nov 2015 | Teampage Plug-ins from Traction Software Japan

Takashi Okutsu, Director of Traction Software's Japanese Business Office has been on a roll. His new plug-ins include: a new Bootstrap3 skin; a new JQuery Mobile skin; Customer Support Request and Customer Quick Reference plug-ins. Takashi is also the author of Gantt Chart, Traction Poll, Mind Map, Pop-up Annotation, and other plug-ins, free to Japanese and International Traction customers.

Japanese customers, please see the プラグイン拡張機能 (Traction Plug-in Extensions) page of the Traction Software's Japanese site. English speaking customers, see this Google Translation of the Japanese Extensions page.

Non-Japanese speaking customers can download and use localized English versions of plug-ins from the Traction Customer Forum (free registration required).

Follow TSIJPBO and TractionTeam on Twitter!

Tweets by @TSIJPBO

Shaka, When the Walls Fell

"Pooh?" said Piglet. "Yes, Piglet?" said Pooh. "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra," said Piglet. "Shaka, when the walls fell," said Pooh.

— Michael G. Munz (@TheWriteMunz) November 17, 2015

What?

In Shaka When The Walls Fell (The Atlantic, June 18, 2014) Ian Bogost poses a challenge based on Darmok, a 1991 Star Trek New Generation episode. Star Trek's Universal Translator knows how to translate the aliens words, but it's completely useless at telling Picard what the Tamarians mean. If that's how Children of Tama communicate, how could they ever have become a starfaring civilization?

"... after hailing the alien ship upon arrival, contact with Children of Tama proves more difficult than Picard imagined:

DATHON, the Tamarian captain: Rai and Jiri at Lungha. Rai of Lowani. Lowani under two moons. Jiri of Umbaya. Umbaya of crossed roads. At Lungha. Lungha, her sky gray.

(no response from Enterprise, looks at First Officer in frustration)

(slowly, deliberately) Rai and Jiri. At Lungha.

In the Star Trek universe, a “universal translator” automatically interprets between any alien language instantly and fluently. Unlike today’s machine translation methods, the universal translator requires no previous experience with another language in order to make sense of it. Such is the case with Tamarian, at least on the surface, as the Enterprise crew is able to comprehend the basic syntax and semantics of Tamarian utterances. “The Tamarian seems to be stating the proper names of individuals and locations,” offers Data, stating the obvious. But Picard quickly sums up the problem, “Yes, but what does it all mean?”

Picard calls the Tamarian's communication model metaphor, Troy calls it image, but according to Bogost's analysis they're both wrong:

"If we pretend that “Shaka, when the walls fell” is a signifier, then its signified is not the fictional mythological character Shaka, nor the myth that contains whatever calamity caused the walls to fall, but the logic by which the situation itself came about. Tamarian language isn’t really language at all, but machinery."

Read Bogost's essay for a fascinating dive into what Bogost calls “procedural rhetoric”—the use of computational processes to depict worldly processes.

I was struck by a simpler point: If the Tamarian's communicate using shared references, this implies:

1) A shared corpus of events known by every member of the Tamarian civilization;

2) A shared means of economically denoting a particular significant event in that corpus, with little likelihood of ambiguity or error;

3) A biological, technological, or technologically augmented biological means for every Tamarian to choose the appropriate event to communicate the desired interpretation (or logic in Bogost's analysis).

This seems like a tall order, but consider that most of us now live in a civilization that assumes that no factual question need go unanswered for more than a few minutes, after poking or talking at pocket sized supercomputer screens meshed with an associatively addressable, world spanning corpus that's glued together by annoying commercials, a few giant companies, and unicorn dreams of VCs.

What Tamarian's need (or have) is a culture spanning version of Doug Engelbart's Journal, a shared, addressable record of Tamarian history and its logic. I'll toss in Vannevar Bush's Memex too, for corpus spanning associative trails, if only we knew how to build the Memex's code book.

Doug on the screen in San Francisco. Dealing lightning with both hands.

Related

In Shaka When The Walls Fell (The Atlantic, June 18, 2014) Ian Bogost. "In one fascinating episode, Star Trek: The Next Generation traced the limits of human communication as we know it—and suggested a new, truer way of talking about the universe."

And here's what Enterprise 2.0 looked like in 1968 | Dealing lightning with both hands... "Doug Engelbart sat under a twenty-two-foot-high video screen, "dealing lightning with both hands." At least that's the way it seemed to Chuck Thacker, a young Xerox PARC computer designer who was later shown a video of the demonstration that changed the course of the computer world." from John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said.

Thought Vectors - Vannevar Bush and Dark Matter Vannevar Bush's 1945 concept of trailblazing, across the dark matter of the Internet.

The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style Addressable work. ... A work graph consists of the units of work (tasks, ideas, clients, goals, agenda items); information about that work (relevant conversations, files, status, metadata); how it all fits together; and then the people involved with the work (who’s responsible for what? which people need to be kept in the loop?)

Oct 2015 | Personal Worklists, Quick Forms

TeamPage Fall 2015 Release introduces Personal Worklists: Track and share what you plan to work on. It's easy to add, rearrange, organize, checkoff and share items on your personal worklist. New Quick Forms make common actions simpler using a right click action or keystroke. TeamPage now automatically checks for updates and notifies your administrator.

Personal Worklists

Worklists make it easy for you to track and share what you plan to work on.

To add an article to your worklist, use the right-click Add to Worklist action. You can also press w in a task list or feed view to add the selected article to your worklist.

As you complete items on your worklist, you can check them off or use the Remove from Worklist action to clear them.

If you want only certain people (or nobody) to be able to modify anyone else's worklist, you can add them to a designated Worklist Managers Group in Server Setup.

Quick Forms

TeamPage now offers several quick forms for common activities such as closing a task, assigning a task, editing an article, and deleting an article. These quick forms can be launched using the right-click context menu, or with a keystroke in list views when you have an item selected (see keystroke table below).

Other Release Highlights

List Separators

Task lists and worklists now support separators, which can be used to organize the list using outline-level headings. Each heading also shows the count and the total time estimates for the tasks contained in that section.

Ordered List Improvements

• Ordered lists now have their own print view, including separators.

• Task lists can now be reset to the default order, clearing any manual overrides.

Projects

The order of the Tasks tab has been rearranged to put Projects first, followed by Milestones, and then Tasks, in order guide people towards using Projects, which support ordered tasklists.

Projects can also be ordered and color-coded on the Projects tab, and the Projects tab can be filtered by color as well as other attributes.

On the project tab, each project block also shows the project's most recent status update. Expanding projects on the projects tab shows an abbreviated project dashboard, highlighting the project's milestones and top tasks.

Blank States

Many views now provide helpful feedback when no content is displayed.

Automatic Check for Updates

TeamPage now checks periodically for whether a newer version has been released and, if so, displays a message to server administrators. Administrators may choose to skip a version or temporarily dismiss the update notification, but can check again any time using the "Check for a New Version of TeamPage" button that appears on the server settings > general page under Runtime Info.

Related

July 2015 | TeamPage Live Task Lists Live task lists keep everyone in synch on order of execution as well as planned end date

May 2015 | TeamPage Bookmarks, interactive filters, and Japanese search improvement Focus on what matters to you

March 2015 | TeamPage 6.1 Burn-up charts, interactive tables, SDK extensions Better tools for understanding the big picture of a projects or milestones

Dec 2014 | TeamPage @ Mentions Bring any TeamPage item to someone's attention, bring them into the followup conversation

The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style Understand how TeamPage connects people and their work

Original Traction Product Proposal

I hope you'll enjoy reading the original Traction Product Proposal, dated October 1997. Many early Traction concepts carried over directly to the Teampage product first commercially released in July 2002, but we've also learned a lot since then - as you might hope! The quotes still make me smile. The Proposal and Annotated References may be helpful to students interested in the history and evolution of hypertext.

Motivated by Chris Nuzum's recent Tripping Up Memory Lane talk at HyperKult 2015, and Takashi's Design Concepts followup, I'm happy to continue the Traction history theme. I've removed the Confidential markings from the Proposal, and released it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial license (CC BY-NC 4.0), so you're welcome to read and use it for non-commercial purposes with attribution. Please link directly to this blog post.

Traction Software folk may make occasional blog posts referencing the Traction History project on this blog or on Twitter. Please follow @TractionTeam on Twitter, and feel free to message me as @roundtrip if you have questions.

The scribbled picture above from about the same time was my visualization of the Traction goal: To link and use anything that would cross a business person's desk using the Web as a platform, rather limiting hypertext to content stuffed inside silos like Lotus Notes.

When we introduced Teampage in 2002, the word "blog" was often dogmatically defined as the unedited voice of a person. It was a tough slog to introduce a chronological stream of content created by a group of people rather than a single individual. The concept of an activity stream or Slack channel - a group of people talking in a shared space or channel - better captures what Teampage does.

Teampage extends the concept of an activity stream or channel to include:

1. Editable entries with a full audit trail, including wiki history
2. An extensible family of entry types (task, status, ...) and relationships (comment, ...)
3. Dashboard and other views that collect, organize, and show entries in context
4. A unified permission model that makes it simple to roll up entries across spaces and navigate or search by topic, context, author, or other criteria, see The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style

Clay Shirky got the concept in his 2003 review: Traction: Weblogs grow up in Social Software: A New Generation of Tools, Release 1.0 Vol 21, No. 5 (pdf). So did Jon Udell in his 2002 InfoWorld review: Getting Traction Traction's enterprise Weblog system gets a grip on corporate KM.

"Somewhere around your 30th responses to a response to a response in Notes, you start to wonder where all this group discussion leads. Somewhere around the fifth time a document marches by with yet more groupware annotations and digital yellow stickies attached, you wonder if it is really all that wise to have all of that group editing taking place. After all, isn’t the purpose of a group to tap the greater intellect represented by all those fine thingies in the group and, once tapped, move quickly to a better decision? Shouldn’t the purpose of groupware be to build more intelligence rather than more features into the product?

While it’s useful to share documents, hold ad hoc discussions and post groupwide projects, the essence of groupware may be the ability to manage a business outcome by divining a group's thought process."

Eric Lundquist, The Next Big Thing in Groupware PC Week 1 July 1996.
Team Problem Solving from Traction Product Proposal Oct 1997 

The core concept was granted US Patent 7,593,954.

The original business case for Teampage cited project work as the most important use. We've learned that it's valuable give people a straightforward way to link action tracking, messaging, and collaborative content creation. By creating and tracking tasks that can be directly attached to Teampage or external content, it's easy to see and stay on top of what's happening for you, by person, by channel, or in context of a specific Teampage project.

We learned how to model permissions to extend work across many internal as well as external groups such as the clients of a consulting firm, or the suppliers and customers of a manufacturer. The Teampage model of multiple permissioned spaces was added soon after the 1997 proposal. You can focus on any space (like a channel) as well as search and navigate across all spaces and entries you have permission to see.

By adding individual and group permissions to a space with an ACL model, internal and external groups share the same Teampage server while seeing and participating in just the set of projects and activities that are appropriate for every individual. Comments, tasks, and tags can cross spaces - so it's simple for internal team members to have a more private discussion linked to a more public paragraph or question posted by an external customer. Streams, discussions, notifications, digests, navigation, tag clouds, and search all obey permissions defined by business rules to show you what you're interested in and have permission to see and nothing more - enforced at the core level.

Email and Teampage has an interesting history. The 1997 proposal describes Traction as an alternative to broadcast email, but cites email as an important source for information to be be recorded and shared. An emailed Digest was one of the first features added to TeamPage based a beta customer's request. The Digest includes title links and content snippets gathered from the stream of events posted since the previous Digest was emailed. The content of each Digest is clipped to conform to what that person is permitted to see.

The Digest remains a popular features of Teampage, later augmented by email notifications with auto threaded email replies: your reply to a Teampage email notification is posted as a comment by you, linked at the right point in the discussion thread - requested by major consulting firm. I agree with Alan Lepofsky's point that email is one of many channels for messsages: we should flip our perspective to the stream of messages rather than the channel used to deliver each message, see Takashi's Eat your spinach post.

This combination of capabilities is particularly valuable for projects that intertwingle collaborative writing, team communication, and action tracking such as: quality management, product development, product support, consulting, and competitive intelligence. See The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style and Teampage Solutions.

A note on links: Although some of the links in the proposal still work, many point to sites which have been moved, including Doug Engelbart references which have moved from bootstrap.org to dougengelbart.org. In most cases a bit of creative Googling will find the referenced page in a different location. If people are interested, I'll publish an editable version of the Annotation References section that can be used to share updated locations. Please message @roundtrip on Twitter if you're interested and willing to pitch in to tracking down current references. Sigh.

More

my posts | thoughtvectors.net

Related

Tripping Up Memory Lane - Hyperkult 2015: Hypertext lessons learned talk by Traction Software CTO and Co-founder Chris Nuzum

Teampage hypertext journal: Design concepts, by Takashi Okutsu Director of Traction Software's Japanese Business Office

Traction Roots - Doug Engelbart - About Doug Engelbart's Journal and Traction.

Enterprise 2.0 - Letting hypertext out of its box - "I believe that the radical departure is the Web as the context of work: the universal medium, universal library, universal marketplace, and universal platform for personal as well as enterprise communication... In every previous generation hypertext system, the ability to read, search, link and communicate came with a terrible price: it might work well, but only if you were willing to put everything you wanted to work with into some sealed box, and convince everyone you wanted to work with to use the same box. From the earliest days of Vannevar Bush's Memex, the vision was universal, but the implementation was a siloed."

Intertwingled Work - Working and scaling like the Web. "... in the past, conversations could only be intertwingled across paper memos, faxes, written reports and email. Until the advent of the Web it wasn't possible to intertwingle conversations, networks, analysis and work in near-real time and global scale. Now that's trivial and essentially free with basic Web access."

The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style - The social dance of getting things done, dealing with exceptions, and staying aware of what’s going on around you

Teampage hypertext journal: Design concepts, by Takashi Okutsu

Takashi Okutsu of Traction Software's Japanese Business Office wrote a blog post, Teampage hypertext journal: Design concepts. Starting from Chris Nuzum's Tripping Up Memory Lane presentation, Takashi explains how TeamPage's append-only journal models editable content, links, and relationships − while maintaining a full audit trail. See this Google English translation.

Teampage's model was inspired by the work of Doug Engelbart, who in 1975 wrote:

Our Journal system was conceived by this author in about 1966. I wanted an underlying operational process, for use by individuals and groups, that would help bring order into the time stream of the Augmented Knowledge workers. The term "journal" emerged early in the conceptualization process for two reasons:

1. I felt it important in many dynamic operations to keep a log (sometimes termed a "journal") that chronicles events by means of a series of unchangeable entries (for instance, to log significant events while evolving a Plan, shaping up a project, trouble-shooting a large operation. or monitoring on-going operations). These entries would be preserved in original form, serving as the grist for later integration into more organized treatments.
2. I also wanted something that would serve essentially the same recorded-dialogue purpose as I perceived a professional journal (plus library) to do.

Compcon 75 Digest, Sep 1975 pp 173-178, Douglas C. Engelbart THE NLS JOURNAL SYSTEM see the full paper, courtesy of the Doug Engelbart Institute.

Working from Chris's presentation notes (pdf), Takashi explains how to Teampage builds on Engelbart's model to support editable, stable two-way links, relationships, and content.

Takashi uses an animation cel analogy to illustrate how the effect of multiple entries in a TeamPage journal can be superimposed to show the effect edits at any point in time. For more detail, see Teampage's US Patent 7,593,954.

Related

Tripping Up Memory Lane Traction Software co-founder and CTO Chris Nuzum talk on hypertext lessons learned, Hyperkult 2015 conference, Lüneburg Germany, 10 July 2015

Traction Roots - Doug Engelbart About Doug Engelbart's Journal

The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style Understand how TeamPage connects people and their work

July 2015 | TeamPage Live Task Lists

TeamPage Summer 2015 Release update introduces live task lists: drag and drop to reorder tasks for a project or milestone, everyone sees the live update. Use shared task lists to keep everyone in synch on order of execution for tasks as well as planned start and end dates. A live Presence bar shows who else is watching the same page.

Live Task Lists

TeamPage task lists now support drag and drop ordering. Task lists shown in the browser automatically update themselves to show changes made by other users. Tasks that have been marked done now fade out and disappear from the task list after a moment. The inline task form now allows saving a new task just by pressing enter when the cursor is in the title field.

In the screenshot to the right, the highlighted task (light blue background) is being dragged to the first position in list (the drag handle is not visible in this screen capture).

Task views also add a Presence bar to show who else is looking at that page, see the three avatars in the upper left after the word Viewing. These people will see the live drag and drop action without having to hit the Refresh button.

Live animation and presence features require a browser that supports WebSockets, starting with Internet Explorer version 10, Google Chrome 16, Firefox 11, or Safari 6 and newer versions.

Other Release Highlights

The release also: improves performance for native fulltext queries, particularly for Japanese language text; restyles email notifications, error and feedback pages, context (right click) menus; improves metadata and fulltext index rebuild status for administrators. The release includes bug fixes, updated internationalization, and other performance improvements.

Related

May 2015 | TeamPage Bookmarks, interactive filters, and Japanese search improvement Focus on what matters to you

March 2015 | TeamPage 6.1 Burn-up charts, interactive tables, SDK extensions Better tools for understanding the big picture of a projects or milestones

Dec 2014 | TeamPage @ Mentions Bring any TeamPage item to someone's attention, bring them into the followup conversation

July 2014 | TeamPage Notifications Introducing inline notifications

June 2014 | Traction® TeamPage 6.0 Major Release. Restyled skin, Editing, Forms, Security, and internal improvements.

The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style Understand how TeamPage connects people and their work

Tripping Up Memory Lane

Last week I gave a talk at the Hyperkult 2015 conference. It was an honor to present there, especially since it was the 25th and final time the conference was held. This was my proposal for the talk:

Sometimes it seems like collaborative software projects are designed in an ahistorical vacuum. Like all our ideas are new. Maybe that’s because so much software is designed by young people fresh out of computer science programs heavy in programming and data structures, but often paying little more obeisance to the history of software than to acknowledge that once people programmed on punch cards, however that worked.

In 1996, after celebrating the 50th Anniversary of As We May Think at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and inspired by a long, encouraging talk with Doug Engelbart, I co-founded Traction Software (originally Twisted Systems, Inc.) and set out to design a memex-inspired literary machine for the augmentation of collective intelligence. In this talk, I’d like to demonstrate how the Traction Hypertext Journaling Engine underlying Traction Software’s TeamPage product borrows from and builds on insights and ideas from Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart, and Ted Nelson. I’ll also talk a bit about what ideas we’ve abandoned and why, and end with some thoughts on ideas that I think haven’t yet had their day.

I'd never given a talk in Germany before, but since the German word Vorlesung means "reading", I thought I had better be prepared with something I could read, even though that's not how I'm used to presenting.

For anyone interested, I've posted the script I prepared for the talk: Tripping Up Memory Lane Script.pdf (14.2MB). The PDF also includes high-resolution versions of the images I used in my slides.

I hope you'll enjoy.

Update: See the University of Lüneburg's video of this talk. Adobe Flash required for Chrome and Internet Explorer 10 and older.

Eat your spinach: Email is good for you, but it could taste a lot better

Takashi Okutsu of Traction Software's Japanese Business Office says that email is like spinach. It may be necessary for a healthy business, but not everyone likes spinach. He says that it's not reasonable to think that Social Network Software replaces email. It's better to look at how SNS extends and complements email. Takashi's July 3, 2015 TractionSoftware.jp blog post explains how, see this rough Google English translation.

Takashi often works with customers who depend on email for external and internal communication. In his blog post he uses several examples:

It's simple to email content into Teampage. The article or comment is automatically logged with the correct Teampage account based on the incoming email address. It's also simple to CC: email to Teampage when you want others to see an outgoing email to a customer or other person you are working with.

People can receive an email notifications when an article they are interested in is posted to Teampage. You can choose to receive notifications based on: comments added to articles or spaces you watch; comments added to articles you wrote or commented on; articles with a tag you watch; articles that mention you.

When you receive an email notification, you can reply to the email to automatically add a comment to the threaded discussion. Only the content you write is added to the thread, not a copy of the entire email thread.

But too many email notifications can be overwhelming. Teampage also provides an automatic email digest that summarizes articles and actions of interest, customized for the preferences (and access permissions) of each Teampage user.

You can use email notifications for your highest priority interests, and use the email digest to catch up on everything else. By default the digest is emailed once a day, but each person can choose to get a digest for a longer period (once a week), or several times a day.

Takashi concludes (in Google translation): "I think you have done already the spinach by e-mail. Why not been investigated in-house social us to support it. Just add a little plus of 'CC in TeamPage', you can get a big plus."

Understanding Spinach Update: Takashi writes that the Japanese word ホウレンソウ (HORENSO) has a literal English translation "spinach", but it is used to refer to a Japanese practice that aligns members understanding and synchronizes actions. Thanks to Takashi and Google Translate, I've learned that: 1) Japanese people have useful terms for communication practices that don't have an English language equivalent. We should adopt them; 2) Teampage is very good for ホウレンソウ !

"HORENSO is a way of information sharing by way of aligning members' understandings and synchronizing actions about changing circumstances that happen in and out of an organization." from NNA post. See also definition of HOKOKU.

Related

Constellation Research Analyst VP Alan Leoposky aka @alepo frequently debunks claims that "email is dead" (or should be), pointing out: 1) Email is universal. No introduction or specialized software required; 2) Email is a firmly established habit. Habits are hard to change, and often shouldn't; 3) Email enables every person to filter, organize and prioritize what they see; 4) Email is one of many channels for messsages: we should flip our perspective to the stream of messages rather than the channel used to deliver each message. I agree.

Dec 2014 | TeamPage @ Mentions Bring any TeamPage item to someone's attention, bring them into the followup conversation

July 2014 | TeamPage Notifications Introducing inline notifications

The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style Understand how TeamPage connects people and their work

My Part Wor ks

About 50 years ago, Andy van Dam joined the Brown University faculty with the world's second PhD in Computer Science (earned at the University of Pennsylvania). Today many of Andy’s friends, faculty, students and former students are celebrating his 50 years at Brown with Stone Age, Iron Age and Machine Age panels. [ June 9, 2015 update: See event video: Celebrate with Andy: 50 Years of Computer Science at Brown University ]

I’m part of the Stone Age cohort. In 1968 Andy and his Swarthmore colleague Ted Nelson gave a medicine show pitch to convince skeptical undergrads to sign up for an an insanely demanding one year, four course sequence then called Applied Math 101/102 and 103/104. I bit.

Starting with a tiny, two person department - and as a matter of principle - Andy recruited undergraduates as teaching and research assistants, a tradition that continues to this day. In an essay on the history of the Brown CS UTA [Undergraduate Teaching Assistant] program Andy said:

“Offering teaching and research assistant opportunities to undergrads,” he says, “was even more unusual, indeed was viewed with everything from skepticism to outright hostility. Hardly anyone said, ‘What a fantastic idea!’ Everyone was used to four years of preparation as an undergraduate, then n years of graduate work before you could contribute to a science. But we’re different. CS was and is young, experimental, and open for undergrads to contribute. And undergraduate participation in research in all fields has become commonplace, especially in the last decade.”

In 1965, a single, intense full-year course could cover much of the breadth, if not the depth, of the systems-oriented portion of the discipline, not including theory, AI, numerical analysis, and a few other topics. Andy insisted that students couldn’t learn to be good programmers by solving small “toy” problems; they had to write significantly-sized programs, each taking multiple weeks.

Not just checking for the right answer but giving useful feedback on structure, style, and efficiency required careful reading and one-on-one help with concepts and debugging. In a class with forty students, it was impossible for one graduate TA and a professor to provide this level of attention, no matter how little sleep they were getting, so van Dam asked for help from students who had taken a prior programming course. In that first cohort, he remembers Bill Adcock; Dan Bergeron, who also subsequently got his PhD with Andy and became Chairman of the CS Department at UNH and went with him and a group of six other of Andy’s students for his first sabbatical in 1971 at the University of Nijmegen in Andy’s country of origin; and Dennis Ruggles, among others.

“The undergraduate teaching assistants,” Andy explains, “though they were initially called graders, didn’t just grade programs -- they not only provided one-on-one help to students but also became active participants in course design and in subsequent years read research papers and brought new ideas into the curriculum. In fact, they did everything graduate TAs did, becoming producers and not just consumers of education. We kept modifying the course as we went along, but the one constant was the highly-appreciated UTA system.”

Few people appreciate it more than Ed Lazowska ‘72, who will lead the first (“Stone Age”) panel for Celebrate With Andy. He says, “I’m a faculty member precisely because of the UTA program. I went to grad school because Andy told me to. In some way, everything I do professionally today is due to him.”

To provide feedback for the course, students wrote detailed, multi-page evaluations, something that was almost unheard of in 1965. As Bob Munck recalls, “Also after every class, the graders would sit around on the floor of Andy's office (later my office) and critique the lecture and him. I'd never seen anything like it.”

On his commute home from work, Andy would listen to tape recordings of his lectures, filling the empty minutes with self-critiques: “Boy, was that a clumsy explanation! Get rid of the ‘um’s and the ‘you know’s.” Presentation skills are still something that van Dam is keenly interested in. “Today’s equivalent of ‘you know’ is ‘like’, which I try to stamp out in all students who work with me. I’ve given up on ‘awesome’.”

An interesting aspect of the UTA program is that the system has essentially never been challenged by students due to the built-in checks and balances. “By having rotating TAs and detailed rubrics,” Andy says, “you create fairness. It’s a system that’s at least as fair as having a single faculty member grading. Besides, a single faculty member, even assisted by a few graduate TAs, can’t begin to read that many programs at the required level of detail, and students recognize that. Part of the checks and balances is that faculty members are responsible for assigning the final grades, and I personally review all borderline grades, hoping to find evidence for promotion to the next grade bin.”

Originally something made up as they went along, the UTA program matured over a period of decades. Iteration and gradual regularization brought cross-course norms and standards that are used today by almost all Brown CS courses. “In my opinion,” says Andy, “We have the most systemic TA program, and there’s a well-defined appeal system in place to address any grading errors.”

You can read about Andy’s honors and achievements on his Wikipedia page, and Professor Shriram Krishnamurthi's answer to Why is professor Andy Van Dam (Andy) so cool? Here are two short stories from me.

After Dinner

Photo of Andy on WBGH Boston’s After Dinner show, broadcast live at 7:30PM Monday October 20, 1969.

After Dinner featured Andy van Dam, Chris Braun, Bev Hodgson (then Brown Daily Herald editor), Al Basile and myself talking about hypertext for 30 minutes on a stage set that was supposed to look like a professor’s living room, right next to Julia Child’s WGBH TV kitchen. Andy is pointing to photo of Chris Braun at the IBM 2250 Hypertext Editing System (HES) console.

AvD writes: You might mention that the topic wasn’t just hypertext per se, but the use of hypertext for non-linear narratives, esp. hypertext fiction as a new literary form (Montreal Expo (68) had just shown an audience-influenced branching movie, Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and Nabokov’s Pale Fire had been published, and experimentation was in the air. I’m sitting in the audience at the YURT inauguration symposium, listening to organizer John Cayley talk about “Cave Writing” and related spatial (immersive) hypertext projects that he and his students craft.

My Part Wor Ks

Brown Computer Science circa 1969. Original edition.

The story as I recall: Most people chose an individual final project for AM 101/102. However, a few folk chose the two person assembler project.

A grader did an in person review with a two person team, noting a problem. One team member replied: “My part works, but he keeps passing me garbage.”

It became a team programming mantra.

The first part was made into a button, with Wor ks spelling. The second part was the AvD equivalent of a secret handshake. Until now.

More

my posts | thoughtvectors.net

Related

Andries van Dam - Wikipedia page

Celebrate With Andy: 50 Years Of CS At Brown - May 2015. An essay celebrating "the three golden anniversaries for the Brown CS family: fifty years of the UTA program, undergraduate involvement in research, and Andy van Dam at Brown."

Why is professor Andy Van Dam (Andy) so cool? - Quora, Jan 2015. I agree with Brown CS professor Shriram Krishnamurthi.

Pastepost - One more AvD story. The first public document from the first Hypertext Editing System was a press release announcing its own creation.​

As We May Work - Andy van Dam - Tokyo 2008

The MIT/Brown Vannevar Bush Symposium - Celebrating the 50th anniversary of Bush's As We May Think. Organized and MC'd by Andy van Dam

Hypertext Editing System - Wikipedia page. Photo by Greg Lloyd.

May 2015 | TeamPage Bookmarks, interactive filters, and Japanese search improvement

TeamPage Summer 2015 Release introduces a new Bookmarks sidebar and interactive filtering. Interactive filtering makes it easy to focus on what interests you; bookmarks make it simple to return to any filtered or standard view with one click. The release also: improves searching and hit highlighting of Japanese text using the TeamPage native search interface; adds new classes to the TeamPage SDK; includes bug fixes, updated internationalization, and performance improvements.

Bookmarks

Now you can bookmark TeamPage views and return to them later. This lets you bookmark and return to filtered task lists, searches, or other TeamPage views including any Article or Dashboard. Bookmarking a filtered view shows new results using the filter settings you saved. To bookmark any view: 1) Click the bookmark icon; 2) The icon changes from empty to filled in, and your current view is added to the Bookmarks list. To navigate to a bookmarked view: Click the title in the Bookmarks list; that title is moved to the top of the Bookmarks list. To delete a bookmark: 1) Click the title of the bookmark you want to delete; 2) Click the bookmark icon. The icon will change from filled in to empty and that bookmark will be deleted from the Bookmarks list.

Interactive Filters

New interactive filtering makes it simple to drill down by Task Assignee, Member and Priority as well as general space, title, author, tags, and contributors. Interactive filters are extensible: application specific entry properties added as a TeamPage plug-in extension are automatically added to the filter menu. The May 2015 release adds interactive filtering for Project Management views and interactive section tables. The June 2, 2015 TeamPage update adds extensible interactive filtering for Activity and other views.

Japanese Search

TeamPage now comes bundled with the kuromoji Japanese morphological analyzer. This improves indexing for native search within Japanese language text, providing much better querying and hit highlighting.

Other Release Highlights

Preferred Article Date and Attribution The new Article Date preference allows the choice of original creation date or last published date to be shown with TeamPage articles. The new Attribution preference allows the choice of the original author name, last editor name, or no author name to be shown with TeamPage articles. TeamPage always records a detailed audit trail including the date and author of every article change, which can be seen an article's History tab or in the Activity feed of a person, space, or other object. The new preferences select the short Article Date and Author name generally shown along with the Article's title in many contexts.

Improved Attivio search filter builder - The filter builder interface has been updated so that it is quicker and more intuitive to apply a filter, and more visually consistent with the rest of TeamPage's user interface.

New SDK EntryField Class - SDK EntryField and EntryFieldRenderer interfaces provide improved access to entry field and other properties used in custom forms and SDK applications.

Related

March 2015 | TeamPage 6.1 Burn-up charts, interactive tables, SDK extensions Better tools for understanding the big picture of a projects or milestones

Dec 2014 | TeamPage @ Mentions Bring any TeamPage item to someone's attention, bring them into the followup conversation

July 2014 | TeamPage Notifications Introducing inline notifications

June 2014 | Traction® TeamPage 6.0 Major Release. Restyled skin, Editing, Forms, Security, and internal improvements.

The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style Understand how TeamPage connects people and their work

March 2015 | TeamPage 6.1 Burn-up charts, interactive tables, SDK extensions

TeamPage 6.1 Spring 2015 Release focuses on improvements to the Project Management suite, including a new "Burn-up Chart" for tracking progress; user-defined interactive tables to dynamically summarize activity; and better tools for understanding the big picture of a project or milestone. This release also includes major under-the-hood improvements to TeamPage's forms SDK to make it easier for developers to create custom forms, or customized variations of standard forms.

Burn-up Charts Track Progress

Project and Milestone dashboards now include a Burn-up Chart. A Burn-up Chart tracks the scope of work to be done to complete a Project or Milestone versus time. You can see the rate at which you're making progress, the scope of the work left to do, as well as track any scope changes, see Why I prefer to use burn-up charts for project planning. The chart is based on on the sum of hours for Completed versus Total Tasks associated with that Project or Milestone. The Default Task Estimate for Task hours can now be specified as a Server default as well as a specific number of hours for each Task.

Improved Section Tables Summarize Activity

TeamPage Sections are user-defined summaries based on live, permission-aware queries that gather and filter articles, comments, projects, tasks, milestones and other objects specified using the TeamPage Section Editor. A Section Table shows this summary as a live table with rows that can be sorted on any column. Individual rows can be expanded inline. Section Tables can be defined and added to any TeamPage article using the rich text editor.

TeamPage 6.1 gives Section Tables a visual makeover, and makes actions that add or update section table rows fully dynamic: the content change is displayed as a live update.

Section Tables are simple but powerful tools to show live business case specific summaries, in context without custom programming beyond the "power user" familiarity with the Section Editor.

Extended SDK Opens New Doors

TeamPage 6.1 introduces and uses new extensions to the TeamPage SDK for Section Tables, TeamPage Forms, and TeamPage Entry Properties. The new SDK extensions enable customer, partner, and Traction Software developers to create new forms and add new properties to TeamPage entries cleanly using the TeamPage plug-in extensible architecture. The new SDK extensions also allow customer or application specific properties or behavior to augment or replace standard "out of the box" behavior. These capabilities make it simpler to develop, adapt, or customize TeamPage for business case and customer specific use cases.

Other Release Highlights

New Task Summary - Shown in sidebar of Project and Milestone dashboards. Shows summary elapsed, estimated and percentage complete for associated Tasks, with breakdown by Assignee and Milestone.

New Space level display settings - Give finer control on the date (created, last edited, last published) and author shown for articles in a spaces.

Improved WebDAV performance - For file attachment and folder features.

Related

Dec 2014 | TeamPage @ Mentions Bring any TeamPage item to someone's attention, bring them into the followup conversation

July 2014 | TeamPage Notifications Introducing inline notifications

June 2014 | Traction® TeamPage 6.0 Major Release notes

The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style Understand how TeamPage connects people and their work

Dec 2014 | TeamPage @ Mentions

TeamPage Fall 2014 Release Introduces inline @ mentions. An @ mention makes it it easy to bring any TeamPage item to someone’s attention just by typing their name. Automatic inline completion makes @ name lookup easy. When a person is mentioned, TeamPage will automatically notify them of follow on comments. Reply to the inline or email notification to add a quick response from your smart phone, tablet, or a Web browser. This is a great way to bring someone into a conversation without sending a hand authored email, text message or other message. @ mentions extend TeamPage's Work Graph model using notation that's familiar from Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other Web services.

When you want to bring a discussion, task, or status post to someone’s attention, just type their @ name, full name, title or any part of their email address. Auto inline completion for @ mentions works in rich text articles, status posts, and comments. That person will get a TeamPage notification, including a link to the article or comment where you mentioned them. By default TeamPage will add the thread in which the person is mentioned to their personal Watch list, so they'll get notifications of follow on comments.

For example, Wile Coyote mentions Greg Lloyd in a comment:

• Greg Lloyd will get a live inline notification;
• Greg Lloyd an email notification with a link back to the original mention, in context;
• TeamPage Watches the discussion thread for Greg Lloyd, to send notifications on follow on comments;
• Greg Lloyd can delete the Watch subscription if he no longer wants to get notifications.

To make @ names easy to find, the @ name is now shown with each person’s profile page, pop-up mini profile, and is included with TeamPage search results preview.

TeamPage also does auto completion lookup for @ user name mentions in articles, comments, and status posts.

Other Release Highlights

Move Article - Makes it easy to move the content and attachements of an article from one space to another, then delete the original article.

Advanced Search - By default, duplicate files aren't listed in search results.

TeamPage SDK updates - Adds SDK support for @ mentions, adds new API capabilities, updates recommended interfaces.

Space Templates - Updates and improves Project Team, Wiki, Intelligence templates. Adds new Management Team template.

Updated internationalization, bug fixes, performance, and other improvements.

Related

July 2014 | TeamPage Notifications Introducing inline notifications

June 2014 | Traction® TeamPage 6.0 Major Release notes

The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style Understand how TeamPage connects people and their work

Enterprise 2.0 - Are we there yet?

Andrew McAfee writes Nov 20, 2014: "Facebook’s recent announcement that it’s readying a version of its social software for workplaces got me thinking about Enterprise 2.0, a topic I used to think a great deal about. Five years ago I published a book with that title, arguing that enterprise social software platforms would be valuable tools for businesses...

Why did it take so long? I can think of a few reasons. It’s hard to get the tools right — useful and simple software is viciously hard to make. Old habits die hard, and old managers die (or at least leave the workforce) slowly. The influx of ever-more Millennials has almost certainly helped, since they consider email antediluvian and traditional collaboration software a bad joke.

Whatever the causes, I’m happy to see evidence that appropriate digital technologies are finally appearing to help with the less structured, less formal work of the enterprise. It’s about time.

What do you think? Is Enterprise 2.0 finally here? If so, why now? Leave a comment, please, and let us know."

Andrew – As we’ve discussed in the past, I don’t believe there’s a specific ‘Are we there yet?’ for Enterprise 2.0.

The lessons I learned from your excellent book and research are still relevant today. Enterprise 2.0 technology enables but does not guarantee organizational change. Some organizational change is invented and purposeful, some is serendipitous and emergent.

The effect of new technology on an enterprise is too often like picking up and shaking a sleepy beehive.

We’ve come a long way towards the vision that software and devices used inside a company will become more like software, Web services and mobile devices people use at home. Enterprise software and services need to meet the same expectations for clarity, any time / any where access, and easy of use that people expect at home, which shakes markets as well as assumptions. Tracking the relationship of Apple IBM from Nov 2009 through Nov 2014 (and their market cap) is an instructive example.

As Peter Drucker taught, organizations need to adapt and innovate to make use of these capabilities, which opens the door to new technology, capabilities, and markets for enterprise software and services at every layer of the stack. Which opens the door to new organizational challenges and opportunities…

I’m not surprised that this takes time - and like Bill Buxton’s analysis in his Long Nose of Innovation article from 2008.

I’ll also keep my faith in Peter Drucker and Doug Engelbart as the twin patron Saints of Enterprise 2.0. As I said in Nov 2009, you have your own sub-numinous stake in the game!

cheers,
Greg

Related

Enterprise 2.0, Finally? Andrew McAfee, Nov 20, 2014 (This blog post was originally posted as a comment)

Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges Andrew McAfee, Harvard Business Review Press, Nov 2009

The Long Nose of Innovation Bill Buxton, Bloomberg Business Week, Jan 8, 2008

Enterprise 2.0 Schism Greg Lloyd, Nov 9, 2009

Ada Lovelace Day | Emmy Noether, Mathematician

Ada Lovelace Day celebrates the contributions of women in science and technology, follow @FindingAda for news and events. This year I've chosen to write about mathematician Amalie "Emmy" Noether. At the time of her death in April 1935, she was described by Pavel Alexandrov, Albert Einstein, Herman Weyl, Norbert Weiner and others as the most important woman in the history of mathematics. Noether’s First Theorem is a fundamental tool of modern physics and the calculus of variations: every symmetry corresponds to a conservation law. "It was her work in the theory of invariants which led to formulations for several concepts of Einstein's general theory of relativity." [J J O'Connor and E F Robertson, 1997]. Of her later work, Nathan Jacobson said: "The development of abstract algebra, which is one of the most distinctive innovations of twentieth century mathematics, is largely due to her – in published papers, in lectures, and in personal influence on her contemporaries." Einstein wrote Noether's obituary in the New York Times, May 5, 1935:

"Within the past few days a distinguished mathematician, Professor Emmy Noether, formerly connected with the University of Göttingen and for the past two years at Bryn Mawr College, died in her fifty-third year. In the judgment of the most competent living mathematicians, Fräulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began. In the realm of algebra, in which the most gifted mathematicians have been busy for centuries, she discovered methods which have proved of enormous importance in the development of the present-day younger generation of mathematicians. Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas. One seeks the most general ideas of operation which will bring together in simple, logical and unified form the largest possible circle of formal relationships. In this effort toward logical beauty spiritual formulas are discovered necessary for the deeper penetration into the laws of nature.

Born in a Jewish family distinguished for the love of learning, Emmy Noether, who, in spite of the efforts of the great Göttingen mathematician, Hilbert, never reached the academic standing due her in her own country, none the less surrounded herself with a group of students and investigators at Göttingen, who have already become distinguished as teachers and investigators. Her unselfish, significant work over a period of many years was rewarded by the new rulers of Germany with a dismissal, which cost her the means of maintaining her simple life and the opportunity to carry on her mathematical studies. Farsighted friends of science in this country were fortunately able to make such arrangements at Bryn Mawr College and at Princeton that she found in America up to the day of her death not only colleagues who esteemed her friendship but grateful pupils whose enthusiasm made her last years the happiest and perhaps the most fruitful of her entire career."

ALBERT EINSTEIN.
Princeton University, May 1, 1935

In The Most Important Mathematician You've Never Heard Of Dr Dave Goldberg summarized Fräulein Noether’s life, her academic struggles - championed by Göttingen mathematicians David Hilbert and Felix Klein - and contributions to the foundations of modern physics.

"Hilbert and Noether skirted the rules by listing Hilbert as a course instructor and then having Noether as the perennial guest lecturer, though this didn't extend to getting Noether any sort of paycheck. It wasn't until 1922 that the Prussian Minister for Science, Art and Public Education gave her any sort of official title or pay at all, and even then only a pittance. As Hilbert described it in his memorial address for Emmy Noether:

When I was called permanently to Göttingen in 1930, I earnestly tried to obtain from the Ministerium a better position for her, because I was ashamed to occupy such a preferred position beside her whom I knew to be my superior as a mathematician in many respects. I did not succeed. . . . Tradition, prejudice, external considerations, weighted the balance against her scientific merits and scientific greatness, by that time denied by no one.

In all events, bringing her to Göttingen turned out to be an incredibly good idea. Almost immediately upon her arrival, Noether derived what's become known as Noether's 1st Theorem and by 1918 had cleaned it up enough for public consumption. And this is where we pick up the physics part of the story."

Fräulein Noether’s name and contributions to mathematics will live forever, despite the obstacles she had to overcome as a mathematical genius of the first rank - who happened to be a woman.

No woman should require the endorsement of mathematical legends like Hilbert, Klein, Einstein, Weyl, and Weiner to pursue and excel in the mathematical, scientific, or other career they love. We need every Fräulein Noether born in whatever place or circumstance, and need to support and encourage all who are inspired by her work and example.

Update See Marie Curie [ and Emmy Noether ] cartoon by xkcd "You don't become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process. So don't try to be the next me, Noether, or Meitner. Just remember that if you want to do this stuff, you're not alone." via @ValdisKrebs

More Finding Ada Blog Posts

Ada icon by Sidney Padua From the Thrilling Adventures of Babbage & Lovelace for your iPad (free). Enjoy Babbage and Lovelace adventures, backstory and more on Sydney Padua's 2D Goggles Web page.

Named Data Networking - Boffin Alert

On Sep 4, 2014 the Named Data Networking project announced a new consortium to carry the concepts of Named Data Networking (NDN) forward in the commercial world. If this doesn't sound exciting, try The Register's take: DEATH TO TCP/IP cry Cisco, Intel, US gov and boffins galore. What if you could use the internet to access content securely and efficiently, where anything you want is identified by name rather than by its internet address? The NDN concept is technically sweet, gaining traction, and is wonderfully explained and motivated in a video by its principle inventor and instigator Van Jacobson. Read on for the video, a few quotes, reference links, and a few thoughts on what NDN could mean for the Internet of Things, Apple, Google and work on the Web. Short version: Bring popcorn.

For a short non-technical introduction, see Wade Roush's Sep 2012 piece on Van Jacobson and Content Centric Networking The Next Internet? Inside PARC’s Vision of Content Centric Networking. Background: Jacobson's work on CCN begot the NDN project, where he is now a Principle Investigator. A few quotes from Roush's story:

The fundamental idea behind Content Centric Networking is that to retrieve a piece of data, you should only have to care about what you want, not where it’s stored. Rather than transmitting a request for a specific file on a specific server, a CCN-based browser or device would simply broadcast its interest in that file, and the nearest machine with an authentic copy would respond. File names in a CCN world look superficially similar to URLs (for example, /parc.com/van/can/417.vcf/v3/s0/Ox3fdc96a4…) but the data in a name is used to establish the file’s authenticity and provenance, not to indicate location.

It’s easy to see how much sense this makes compared to the current client-server model. Say I’m using my Apple TV box to browse my Flickr photo collection on my big-screen TV. To get each photo, the Apple TV has to connect to Flickr, which is hosted on some remote data center owned by Yahoo—it could be in Utah or North Carolina, for all I know. The request has to travel from the Apple TV over my Wi-Fi network, into Comcast’s servers, then across the Internet core, and finally to Yahoo. Then the photos, which amount to several megabytes each, have to travel all the way back through the network to my TV.

But the photos on Flickr are just copies of the originals, which are stored on my camera and on my laptop, about 15 feet away from my TV. It would be much smarter and more economical if the Apple TV could simply ask for each photo by name—that is, if it could broadcast its interest in the photo to the network. My laptop could respond, and I could keep browsing without the requests or the data ever leaving my apartment. (In Jacobson’s scheme, file names can include encrypted sections that bar users without the proper keys from retrieving them, meaning that security and rights management are built into the address system from the start.)

“The simplest explanation is that you replace the concept of the IP address as the defining entity in the network with the name of the content,” says Lunt. “Now all the talk in the network is about ‘Have you seen this content?’ and ‘Who needs this content?’ as opposed to ‘What is the routing path to particular terminus in the network?’ It’s a simple idea, but it makes a lot of things possible...

“One of the things that’s intriguing about not having to go to the source is that you could start to think about implementing applications differently,” Lunt says. “You could build apps that don’t have any notion of a server at all. So you could have Twitter without Twitter or Facebook without Facebook—that is, without having to have a major investment in hosting content, because the network is caching it all over the place.”

Such architectures might give users more control over privacy and security of their data, and let them share their own data across devices without having to go through proprietary services like Apple’s iCloud, PARC executives say.

“What Apple is trying to do with iCloud is to say: You shouldn’t have to care which device you got an app on, or which device you took a photo on, whether it was your iPad or iPhone or MacBook Air. You just want your content to be on the other devices when you want it,” says Steve Hoover, CEO of PARC. “That validates our vision. But the way they are solving that puts more load on the network than it needs to, and it requires consumer lock-in. So Apple may be a user of this [CCN] technology one day, because it will make it easier. On the other hand, they could also hate it, because it will make it a lot easier for other people to provide that capability of getting the content whenever you want.”

In my option, one of the technically sweetest characteristics of NCN is its relationship to current TCP/IP and networking protocols (quotes from NDN Architecture: Motivation and Details):

Like IP, NDN is a “universal overlay”: NDN can run over anything, including IP, and anything can run over NDN, including IP. IP infrastructure services that have taken decades to evolve, such as DNS naming conventions and namespace administration or inter-domain routing policies and conventions, can be readily used by NDN. Indeed, because NDN’s hierarchically structured names are semantically compatible with IP’s hierarchically structured addresses, the core IP routing protocols, BGP, IS-IS and OSPF, can be used as-is to deploy NDN in parallel with and over IP. Thus NDN’s advantages in content distribution, application-friendly communication, robust security, and mobility support can be realized incrementally and relatively painlessly...

Communication in NDN is driven by the receiving end, i.e., the data consumer. To receive data, a consumer sends out an Interest packet, which carries a name that identifies the desired data (see Figure 2). A router remembers the interface from which the request comes in, and then forwards the Interest packet by looking up the name in its Forwarding Information Base (FIB), which is populated by a name-based routing protocol. Once the Interest reaches a node that has the requested data, a Data packet is sent back, which carries both the name and the content of the data, together with a signature by the producer’s key (Figure 2). This Data packet follows in reverse the path taken by the Interest to get back to the consumer. Note that neither Interest nor Data packets carry any host or interface addresses (such as IP addresses); Interest packets are routed towards data producers based on the names carried in the Interest packets, and Data packets are returned based on the state information set up by the Interests at each router hop (Figure 3).

The router stores in a Pending Interest Table (PIT) all the Interests waiting for returning Data packets. When multiple Interests for the same data are received from downstream, only the first one is sent upstream towards the data source. Each PIT entry contains the name of the Interest and a set of interfaces from which the Interests for the same name have been received. When a Data packet arrives, the router finds the matching PIT entry and forwards the data to all the interfaces listed in the PIT entry. The router then removes the corresponding PIT entry, and caches the Data in the Content Store. Because an NDN Data packet is meaningful independent of where it comes from or where it may be forwarded to, the router can cache it to satisfy future requests. Because one Data satisfies one Interest across each hop, an NDN network achieves hop-by-hop flow balance...

Names

NDN design assumes hierarchically structured names, e.g., a video produced by PARC may have the name/parc/videos/WidgetA.mpg, where ‘/’ indicates a boundary between name components (it is not part of the name). This hierarchical structure is useful for applications to represent relationships between pieces of data. For example, segment 3 of version 1 of the video might be named /parc/videos/WidgetA.mpg/1/3. The hierarchy also enables routing to scale. While it may be theoretically possible to route on flat names (see ROFL), it is the hierarchical structure of IP addresses that enables aggregation, which is essential in scaling today’s routing system. Common structures necessary to allow programs to operate over NDN names can be achieved by conventions agreed between data producers and consumers, e.g., name conventions indicating versioning and segmentation.

Name conventions are specific to applications but opaque to the network, i.e., routers do not know the meaning of a name (although they see the boundaries between components in a name). This allows each application to choose the naming scheme that fits its needs and allows the naming schemes to evolve independently from the network.

I haven't quoted from short sections on Data Centric Security, Routing and Forwarding, Intelligent Data Plane, Caching, or Intellectual Property Approach and open source. You should read NDN Motivation & Details, then much more from named-data.net if either your head exploded, or you are jumping up and down in your seat with questions and objections.

Much of this is QED Marketing - I told you how it works, not what it means for you. Here are a few thoughts:

1) Secure efficient transport of content crossing many boundaries is a hard problem, getting harder as the number of people, things, and places on the Web grow, and as people look for a seamless and trusted way to deal with things they care about at home and at work. For example, how could Apple (or Google) leverage NDN to deliver on an internet of your things? How might players other than the giants leverage NDN to compete?

2) NDN offers the possibility of doing a lot of the hard work at the network level, which is a win if it offers a economic benefit to those who pay for the fabric of the internet, and opportunities to invent and grow scalable businesses more effectively. For example, what could change if Amazon offered NDN as an Amazon Web Service?

3) NDN might offer an appropriate secure, flexible framework for connecting people to content at work. Businesses use siloed applications for for transactional data for good reasons: they are simpler to build, (potentially) more secure, and (potentially) more flexible than old style monolithic business applications if they become sources of content linked together at a higher level of an application stack. NDN might be a great protocol to build flexible, secure, extensible business applications connecting people to the content they want - and are allowed to use.

With respect to the network issues, I'm a fan, not an expert, but the NDN proposal seems to share many of the (relatively) simple, scalable, decentralized characteristics that fueled the growth of the Web and evolution of TCP/IP. NDN seems to be most attractive for big content, particularly where multicast style delivery and caching can delivery big bandwidth and responsiveness improvements, but it looks like a lot of thought has gone into efficient localized delivery. Likewise, management of a very large, frequently changing name space is a challenge, which also seems to have gotten a lot of intelligent attention.

With Cisco and Huawei on board as founding industrial partners of the NDN Consortium, you can bet that a lot of caching routers can be sold, and NDN routing technology will take the fast track if there's economic payback for NDN, which will drive better payback, faster adoption, etc.

The good thing is the program has advanced to the stage where many of these questions can answered by experiment - we shall see.

Will the NDN Consortium take off? Will Google, Apple and Microsoft jump in? Or will NDN join the queue of technically sweet solutions that never really get off the ground? I'm optimistic that NDN has the right technical characteristics and pedigree, with smart experienced people leading the charge. With the Internet of Things and secure content distribution efficiencies as economic drivers, I hope we'll all benefit from NDN's content delivery model as the next stage of the Web's evolution. If you're not in the battle, bring popcorn and watch - it should be a good show.

Related

Named Data Networking Architecture: Motivation & Details The best short technical overview I've found of the objectives and approach of the Named Data Networking project. Read the overview to get quick idea of how content is named, the NDN security and caching model, how NDN works over (or under) TCP, scaling issues, and more.

A New Way to Look at Networking - Van Jacobson's Aug 2006 Google Tech talk on TCP and Content Centric Networking (CCN). CCN is the title of Jacobson's Xerox PARC project, which became "the single biggest internal project at PARC." CCN led to the formation of the Named Data Networking project as a National Science Foundation funded Future Internet Architecture program in Sep 2010. Jacobson is currently a Principle Investigator of the NDN project. See Van Jacobson speaks on Content Centric Networking for a longer (three hour) and slightly earlier version of Jacobson's CCN talk presented as a Future Internet short course, including slides.

Reinventing the Web II (Aug 2014) The Web won vs "better" models by turning permanence into a decentralized economic decision. Why isn't the Web a reliable and useful long term store for the links and content people independently create? What can we do to fix that? Who benefits from creating spaces with stable, permanently addressable content? Who pays? What incentives can make Web scale permanent, stable content with reliable bidirectional links and other goodies as common and useful as Web search over the entire flakey, decentralized and wildly successful Web? NDN is the sweetest and most credible global technical approach I've seen.

Continuity and Intertwingled Work (Jun 2014) A level above an Internet of Things: seamless experience across devices for you, your family, your health and trusted service providers, at home and at work.

Intertwingled Work (Jul 2010) No one Web service or collection of Web servers contain everything people need, but we get along using search and creative services that link content across wildly different sources. The same principal applies when you want to link and work across wildly diverse siloed systems of record and transactional databases.

Thought Vectors - Ted Nelson: Art not Technology (Jul 2014) Ted Nelson should be smiling - but I won't hazard a guess. From what I see, everything in NDN seems compatible if not influenced by the Docuverse, Tumbler, and fine grain content addressable network architecture that Nelson described in detail in his 1987 book Literary Machines. I believe NDN provides secure, scalable, fine grain, and upwards compatible networking that could connect the front end and back end Xanadu architecture that Nelson describes in Literary Machines. I'll follow up on this with a separate Boffin alert.

Sept 2014 | KMWorld names TeamPage a Trend-Setting Product of 2014

On Sept 1, 2014 KMWorld recognized Traction Software's TeamPage as a Trend-Setting Product of 2014. KMWorld editor Hugh McKellar writes: "This year, we looked at more than 600 products. Traction TeamPage was selected by the panel because it demonstrates thoughtful, well-reasoned innovation and execution for the most important constituency of them all: the customer.” Traction Software is honored that KMWorld has again selected TeamPage as a Trend-Setting Product. TeamPage customers such as Alcoa and Athens Group show the value of integrated action tracking and collaboration in support of knowedge management, quality management, project management, and similar business activities. Read KMWorld Trend-Setting Products of 2014

Related

Alcoa Tackles IT Projects and Compliance

Aug 2014 | Providence Business News - Social tools being adapted for Web-based QC tool

June 2014 | Traction® TeamPage 6.0

Linked, Open, Heterogeneous

Art, Data, and Business Duane Degler of Design For Context posted slides from his 5 April 2014 Museums and the Web talk, Design Meets Data (Linked, Open, Heterogeneous). Degler addresses what he calls the LAM (Libraries, Archives, Museums) Digital Information Ecosystem. I believe the same principles apply when businesses connect internal teams, external customers, external suppliers, and partners of all sorts as part of their Business Information Ecosystem. Read Degler's summary and slides, below:

"The tide of available information continues to rise. The opportunities that come from open access, linked data, sharing resources with other institutions, and standards-based data are enticing - and perhaps overwhelming?

Emerging design approaches help you find ways to make the most of your opportunities for new types of interactions and engagement with Information Objects. They focus on:

- Exploration, serendipity, use: Rich, relevant design requires an intimate understanding of information and the way people interact with it. It's more than attractive styling - although that's important. It's about people engaging in ways that stimulate the intellect and the experience. People need to find information, use it, relate other information to it, and share it for decades to come.

- Scalability, persistence, authority: Rich, relevant design also takes the long view. Understanding that the integrity of the information matters. This is increasingly important as we move toward more linked, open, and born digital cultural information.

Your institution becomes a gateway to an ecosystem of artistic imagery, scholarly insights, history, perspectives, and related objects. Other people will use your information to create new interpretations and works, which then build on what you hold. Curating information may be perceived as a burden (to be made easier!), yet it is a significant opportunity to reinforce the value and authority of institutions that enhance the information ecosystem."

Related

Dark Matter by Michael Peter Edson 19 May 2014. "The dark matter of the Internet is open, social, peer-to-peer and read/write—and it’s the future of museums" an important essay on the opportunity and mission for museums and cultural institutions: "We’re so accustomed to the scale of attention that we get from visitation to bricks-and-mortar buildings that it’s difficult to understand how big the Internet is—and how much attention, curiosity, and creativity a couple of billion people can have."

Thought Vectors - Vannevar Bush and Dark Matter (2014) Inspired by Michael Edson's essay. Just as Bush suggested in July 1945, I believe there's a need for people to act as explorers, guides, and trail blazers over knowledge they know and love. You can experience that personal knowledge and passion on a tour, at a talk, or in a conversation on a bus, at a party - anywhere you meet someone who loves one of these institutions. I think it's particularly valuable to have trail blazers who are also skilled professionals personally represent and communicate the values, knowledge, and heritage of their museum, just as a great reference librarian becomes a library's ambassador.

Reinventing the Web II (2014) Why isn't the Web a reliable and useful long term store for the links and content people independently create? What can we do to fix that? Who benefits from creating spaces with stable, permanently addressable content? Who pays? What incentives can make Web scale permanent, stable content with reliable bidirectional links and other goodies as common and useful as Web search over the entire flakey, decentralized and wildly successful Web?

Intertwingled Work (2010) No one Web service or collection of Web servers contain everything people need, but we get along using search and creative services that link content across wildly different sources. The same principal applies when you want to link and work across wildly diverse siloed systems of record and transactional databases.

Aug 2014 | Providence Business News - Social tools being adapted for Web-based QC tool

Writing in the 8 Aug 2014 Providence Business News, Staff Writer Patrick Anderson interviewed Traction Software VP of Sales Jordan Frank and Thomas Cogdell, DTA quality manager for Houston-based firm The Athens Group. The oil-rig consulting firm purchased TeamPage to support its push for ISO 9001 certified rig inspection, verification and technology assurance services. Anderson quotes Cogdell: “The reason we chose it is because it is Web based with a good security audit and trail feature,” said Thomas Cogdell, DTA quality manager for Athens Group. “Every change to every document is tracked and reported on, and nothing gets lost. It gives us the flexibility to encourage employees to add to the knowledge base freely and the quality control we need.” » Read the full story

Related

Athens Group - Traction TeamPage for Quality Management, Training and Knowledge Base

July 2014 | TeamPage Notifications

Traction Software Summer 2014 Release New features include inline-page push Notifications, extending TeamPage's email notifications. Notifications make it simple to focus on activity that's important to you. Get more details, or send a quick reply whether in your office or using your smartphone or tablet. Change what you watch when your priorities and interests change. Available now, contact us for more information or a free trial.

The new Notifications menu makes it simple to skim and keep a summary of activity you decide to watch. The menu shows the current notification count, and expands to let you read, flag, or clear any notification. Click the title or one of the notification's Task, Project, or Milestone links to see it in context. Click the bubble icon of a notification to add a quick comment. Links at the bottom of the menu let you quickly mark all notifications read, clear all read notifications, and to show an expanded feed of all notifications.

Other Release Highlights

Streamlined Watch interface - Improves the sidebar's Watch menus, used to watch any Space, Person, Tag, or Article and change watch settings. You can also choose to receive automatic notifications for any Task you're mentioned in, changes to articles you create, or discussions you've participated in. Automatic notifications are configurable as personal preferences, using a streamlined user interface.

Improved Rich Text Editing for iOS devices - Rich text editing using the updated and improved rich text editing support introduced with TeamPage 6.0.

TeamPage SDK improvements - For login, authentication, and property list iteration, bug fixes and other improvements.

Updated internationalization, bug fixes and other improvements.

Related

June 2014 | Traction® TeamPage 6.0 Major release notes.

The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style Understand how TeamPage connects people and their work.

Hello! Greetings from Takashi Okutsu

Hi everyone. I am delighted to introduce myself to you as a member of the Traction Software Team. As some of you know, my name is Takashi Okutsu, and I am the director of Traction Software's Japan Business Office, located in Yokohama.

I have worked for Applied Knowledge in Japan as technical support staff, and have a long association with TeamPage since 2007. During this job, I helped many customers to improve their business with TeamPage and got lots of experience.

I am very happy to keep supporting these customers, introducing our products to new clients, and consulting with all TeamPage customers based on my experience. I believe our product TeamPage is a flexible and adaptable tool and service for many customers and business areas, and hope you like it.

If you should need additional information regarding me or Japan Business Office, or if you need any help regarding TeamPage, please do not hesitate to contact me. You can email to takashi@tractionsoftware.com. I am looking forward to talk with you.

皆様、こんにちは。私は、奥津岳と申します。横浜にある Traction Software の日本支店（トラクション・ソフトウェア・インク）の代表を務めています。

TeamPage には 2007 年から長く関わっています。前職では、株式会社アプライドナレッジにて技術サポート スタッフとして、TeamPage を通じて多くのお客様の業務改善のお手伝いをさせていただき、たくさんの経験を積むことができました。今年からはトラクション・ソフトウェア・インク代表として、お客様へのサポート、製品の紹介、経験に基づいたコンサルティングなどご提供しております。

私たちの製品 TeamPage は、とても柔軟性があり、様々な業務に適用できる製品／サービスであると自負しています。多くの方々に気に入っていただけることを願います。

トラクション・ソフトウェア・インクや製品／サービスにご興味がございましたら、お気軽に私のメールアドレス takashi@tractionsoftware.com までお問い合わせください。皆様からのご連絡をお待ちしております。

Thought Vectors - Ted Nelson: Art not Technology

The technoid vision, as expressed by various pundits of electronic media, seems to be this: tomorrow's world will be terribly complex, but we won't have to understand it. Fluttering though halestorms of granular information, ignorant like butterflies, we will be guided by smell, or Agents, or leprechauns, to this or that pretty picture, or media object, or factoid. If we have a Question, it will be possible to ask it in English. Little men and bunny rabbits will talk to us from the computer screen, making us feel more comfortable about our delirious ignorance as we flutter through this completely trustworthy technological paradise about which we know less and less.

To give up on human understanding is to give up hope, what we call in English "a counsel of despair." I think there is hope for much better and more powerful software designs that will give ordinary people the power over computers that they have always wanted - power with complete understanding. But that requires inspired software design, which I believe is art and not technology.

I believe the technoid vision does not comprehend what is humanly desired, humanly needed, and humanly possible. Especially the need and possiblity of human understanding. So excuse me from the butterfly crowd; I hope you will come with me to where understanding may be found.

Ted Nelson
The Future of Information
ASCII Corporation, Japan 1997
Image courtesy of Computer History Museum

This quote from Ted Nelson's 1997 book makes a point similar to Nelson's closing point in his July 2014 interview with Gardner Campbell as well as statements in his 2011 Possiplex autobiography, and 1975 Computer Lib / Dream Machines. Nelson sees computer technology as a medium for creative expression, not an end in itself, or a cheap replacement for human creativity. He cites film directors among his primary inspirations and heros, noting that his personal ephipany came in the early 1960's when he learned that it was possible to connect computers to screens. Nelson invented the terms hypertext and hypermedia to describe the new capabilities that he envisioned. During his 2014 interview Nelson cited the example of Orson Wells. For Ted Nelson, what you see on a computer screen and interact with should be the result of human creative intelligence applied through the use of new engines of expression over an endlessly evolving intertwingled corpus of literature. Using Nelson's cinema analogy, history put him in a position where he would have to invent the motion picture camera to achive his goals, but I believe his motivation was to become the seminal director and intellectual father of the new media which are his earliest and most influential inventions.

Later

I am not a programmer, but a designer-director of software (like Doug Engelbart and Steve Jobs, but with far fewer resources). Every delivery is a negotiated reduction of a vision against resources, technical restrictions, and time.

— Theodor Holm Nelson (@TheTedNelson) November 11, 2018

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Intertwingled, The Festschrift-- Ebook celebrating Ted Nelson Day at Chapman University, 2014 (Springer-Verlag) (via @TheTedNelson, 12 Jul 2015) A free Springer ebook edited by Douglas R. Dechow and Daniele C. Struppa. Chapters by Alan Kay, Brewster Kahle, Belinda Barnet, Ken Knowlton, Dame Wendy Hall, and others. Closing chapter What Box? by Ted Nelson. I highly recommend this book.

Living The Dreams: A Conversation With Ted Nelson Published on Jul 5, 2014. Dr. Ted Nelson speaks with Dr. Gardner Campbell about research, fantics, computer liberation, and the ongoing struggle between schooling and learning. A conversation undertaken in support of "Living The Dreams: Digital Investigation and Unfettered Minds," a digital engagement pilot of Virginia Commonwealth University's UNIV 200, Inquiry and the Craft of Argument.

Ted Nelson talk - Possiplex book launch From Welcome to Possiplex : An Autobiography of Ted Nelson party at the Internet Archive on Oct 8, 2010.

Possiplex: Movies, Intellect, Creative Control, My Computer Life and the Fight for Civilization, an autobiography of Ted Nelson, Mindful Press, Feb 2011.

Triangulation 164 - Conversation with Ted Nelson Leo Laporte's July 2014 conversation with Ted Nelson, broadcast Aug 18, 2014 on TWiT.tv. On hypertext, Xanadu - and being a media guy. "To me, all media are alike. You think about what are the effects you want - and you think about what are the technicalities it will take to give you those effects. So when I took a computer course in graduate school, I thought 'Holy smoke, you can put interactive screens on them'... Interactive screens were instantly obvious to me."

Computer Lib / Dream Machines A brief description of Ted Nelson's 1974 book. Ordering information for an authorized 2014 replica reprint, which I highly recommend.

Ladies and gentlemen, the age of prestidigitative presentation and publishing is about to begin. Palpitating presentations, screen-scribbled, will dance to your desire, making manifest the many mysteries of winding wisdom. But if we are to rehumanize an increasingly brutal and disagreeable world, we must step up our efforts. And we must hurry. Hurry. Step right up.

Theodor H. Nelson, “Barnum-Tronics.”
Swarthmore College Alumni Bulletin, Dec 1970, 12-15
Quoted from Dream Machines, 1975
See New Media Reader Computer Lib / Dream Machines excerpt

Video Archive MIT / Brown Vannevar Bush Symposium: A Celebration of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Vision, An Examination of What Has Been Accomplished, and What Remains to Be Done. Oct 12-13 1995, MIT. Talks and panel discussion with Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, Andy van Dam, Tim Berners-Lee, Alan Kay and others. See also ACM Interactions summary (free access), transcript of day 1 and day 2 panels.

Meet Takashi Okutsu: Director, Traction Software Japanese Business Office

Takashi has been a TeamPage wizard since 2007, and now directs Traction Software's Japanese Business Office. Takashi provides exceptional sales, consulting, and support to TeamPage customers in Japan. He is a valued member of the Traction Software global team, and a frequent contributor to the TeamPage Customer Support Forum including development and discussion of TeamPage SDK plug-ins and examples. We invite Japanese visitors to explore TractionSoftware.jp for TeamPage information and a free trial. You are also welcome to join the TeamPage Japan Customer Support Forum to talk with Takashi and Japanese TeamPage customers.

Please follow Takashi on Twitter as TSIJPBO for Japanese TeamPage news from トラクション ソフトウェア (Traction Software Branch Office), Yokohama, Japan.

You can also follow Takashi's Buna Tree Melopan Twitter account to learn about walking in the Tanzawa mountain area of Kanagawa Prefecture, computer topics, and Japanese cooking, including camping meals Takashi has made with his Traction Software Swiss Army knife.

June 2014 | Traction® TeamPage 6.0

Traction Software is proud to announce Traction TeamPage 6.0, a major release incorporating important new features, improvements, and internal updates, as well as consolidated capabilities from updates shipped over the TeamPage 5.2 baseline. Sign up for a free trial, or download a free TeamPage license for free access to Traction Software's Customer Support and Customer Forum TeamPage server, including installer links and detailed change log information.

Traction TeamPage 6.0 Feature Highlights

Updated Styles for the Proteus Skin - Cleaner, crisper, less cluttered appearance. Icon and font rendering updates improve performance as well as style.

New Forms - TeamPage's Web based forms for creating and editing articles, tasks, and other TeamPage objects use a new forms framework. The new forms look cleaner, crisper and simpler. Developers can make their own forms that use standard features like naming, moderation, parent/child relationships, related project, related milestone and more. Forms support saving and loading template articles, making it to define and use templates for common tasks, meeting agendas, and other activities.

Updated and Improved Rich Text Editing - TeamPage uses the TinyMCE open source rich text editor, donating contributions back to the main project. TeamPage 6.0 incorporated the latest TinyMCE fixes and improvements, making rich text editing more reliable, easier to use, and visually attractive.

Jetty Web Server - TeamPage now includes the Jetty web server, which offers many advantages, including: server-tracked sessions, with the associated ability for administrators to expire any or all active sessions; tunable throttling to combat DDoS attacks; better resource management for handling incoming connection requests; and forward-looking compatibility with protocols such as SPDY and WebSocket to make it easier to keep TeamPage up to date with future innovations that affect the world of web based applications.

Smaller Memory Footprint - The amount of memory that TeamPage uses to provide access to the settings and properties associated with users, spaces, the journal, and the server has been greatly reduced without sacrificing performance. This can be a big benefit for TeamPage deployments of all sizes.

Updated Setup Interface - The Personal, Space and Server Setup pages have been redesigned and reorganized to make it easy to configure and maintain TeamPage defaults and options. The TeamPage unified search box at the top of every Setup page makes it simple to jump quickly to the right page by typing part of the name of a page or option and choosing from a list relevant Setup Pages that use that term.

Security Improvements - TeamPage 6.0 has been updated to use the latest industry standard procedures and cryptographic algorithms for password security, including the PBKDF2 standard (i.e., IETF RFC 2898). TeamPage now also keeps track of information about recent authentication attempts for each user account. Administrators can access this information for any user at any time, and each user can always access this information for their own account. Security conscious administrators have the option to require that each user review a summary of the previous successful and failed attempts to authenticate with their user name.

Improved PDF export - A new HTML to PDF export framework incorporates many improvements and fixes, particularly for robust cleanup and handling of messy or invalid HTML copied from external sources.

Improved invitations - Inviting someone to TeamPage automatically subscribes them to receive notifications for the spaces to which they have been invited.

IE7 Compatibility Mode - The Proteus skin now supports Microsoft IE 8 and newer browsers running with IE7 Compatibility Mode enabled.

Updated internationalization - Particularly for the Japanese locale.

Many Developer SDK improvements and examples

Many bug fixes and small improvements

TeamPage 5.2 features and improvements incorporated with Teampage 6.0

Traction Software's policy is to release incremental updates on a rolling basis to introduce new features, improvements, and bug fixes. Traction Software updates TeamPage for all Cloud hosted customers, and provides update installers for customers who choose to deploy TeamPage on their own systems. Updates with major improvements are typically released on a semi-annual to quarterly basis, with minor improvements and bug fixes on a quarterly to monthly basis depending on the urgency of any associated bug fix.

Traction® TeamPage 5.2 introduced capabilities to make it simple to track actions, show activity, watch status, and follow discussions embedded in the flow of collaborative work. TeamPage 5.2's new activity dashboards show actions, status and work in context using a format that's easy to read and reduces information overload. Activity dashboards allow people dive into and watch activity associated with projects or milestones they want to focus on, while also seeing, searching, exploring and connecting with others across a broad range of actions organized by business context as well as person. TeamPage 5.2 also introduced drag-and-drop file upload and image insertion for Web browsers supporting the new HTML 5 standard.

TeamPage Fall 2011 release: Traction TeamPage Social Enterprise Web and Attivio Plus options. The Social Enterprise Web option enables TeamPage to share, tag, comment, task, index and search linked public Web or company intranet pages. TeamPage Web browser extensions, inline badges and comment widgets link external Web sources to TeamPage discussion and provide visual feedback (similar to the way Disqus adds shared comments to pages on the public Web). The Attivio Plus option integrates deep search and discussion with live content stored in external line of business systems. The option provides permission-aware search, analysis, tagging, tasking, and sharing of content spanning TeamPage, SharePoint, email in Exchange, Documentum, File servers, SQL Databases, the public Web, private intranets, and other sources.

TeamPage Summer 2012 release: One-click action to allow TeamPage members to invite other people to join a TeamPage space (automatically creating account and adjusting permissions as needed per configurable rules); section table widget shows entry properties, including properties added as entry, task and custom entry type extensions; new developer SDK/SDL features; rewritten SDL documentation with FAQ and tree-structured index of SDL tags.

TeamPage Winter 2012 release: Calendar Events used to record meeting and other dates can be created, edited and shown along with project, milestone and task related dates. Project, task and milestone dashboards can now shown Twitter style status dialog focused on that specific activity; zoom out to see all status dialog in a space, from a person, or a merge stream of all status your have permission to see; type-ahead navigation and Attivio query completion suggestions; emailed notifications include a list of attached files; new sort options for Project, Milestone, Task sections; Java 7 update; user interface and performance improvements; developer updates.

Teampage Spring 2013 release: Unified search for quick lookup of people, spaces, tasks, projects and milestones; "finish later" and autosave support for articles, tasks, projects, milestones and comments; updated IOS 6 iPad and iPhone support; streamlined header design and navigation; Cloud pricing options, first month free; developer updates.

TeamPage Fall 2013 release: Upgrade to Java 7 as default and recommended Java version; Compatible with Attivio AIE release 3.5.1; Improved developer SDK support for custom entry types; Improved YouTube widget; improved feedback and erase features; developer updates; bug fixes and performance improvements.

Learn more

Sign up for a free trial, or download a free TeamPage license for free access to Traction Software's Customer Support and Customer Forum TeamPage server, including installer links and detailed change log information.

The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style Understand how TeamPage connects people and their work.

Thought Vectors - What Motivated Doug Engelbart

By "augmenting human intellect" we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insoluble. And by "complex situations" we include the professional problems of diplomats, executives, social scientists, life scientists, physical scientists, attorneys, designers--whether the problem situation exists for twenty minutes or twenty years. We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human "feel for a situation" usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids. 1a1

Man's population and gross product are increasing at a considerable rate, but the complexity of his problems grows still faster, and the urgency with which solutions must be found becomes steadily greater in response to the increased rate of activity and the increasingly global nature of that activity. Augmenting man's intellect, in the sense defined above, would warrant full pursuit by an enlightened society if there could be shown a reasonable approach and some plausible benefits. 1a2

Doug Engelbart Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. SRI Summary Report AFOSR-3223, October 1962

This week's Thought Vectors in Concept Space assignment is a blog post based on a nugget from the works of Doug Engelbart. I like this quote because Doug talks clearly about what motivates his research; what motivated his life's work.

To me, it's interesting to note that Doug wrote his report in 1962 just as NASA was launching Project Apollo, and not long after President John F. Kennedy announced his challenge to land on the Moon. Project Apollo was arguably the most challenging engineering project of the 20th century, designing and testing families of new engineering systems as well as new classes of hardware. But Project Apollo was more than an engineering project; it was a grand challenge that motivated NASA to do its best and engaged most of the world as spectators in a high stakes, highly visible race to the Moon.

Doug's vision was also an engineering vision, designing and testing new human/computer systems as well as new classes of software. The paragraphs, links, paragraph-grain addresses, relationships, viewspecs and visualizations of Augment/NLS made Doug's thought vectors as real as they could possibly be, recording, linking and animating thoughts in a way that could never be done with paper plans and records. But like Project Apollo, Doug's vision was more than an engineering project; it was and is a grand challenge, to find better ways to enable people to solve critical problems, part of a trail on augmentation started by Vannevar Bush that will never end.

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Doug Engelbart | 85th Birthday Jan 30, 2010 - Blog post celebrating Doug Engelbart's 85th birthday, includes quotes and links to resources. One of the quotes from Engelbart's talk at the Brown/MIT Vannevar Bush Symposium became the tag line for this VCU course.

DougEngelbart.org: The Doug Engelbart Institute was was conceived by Doug Engelbart to further his lifelong career goal of boosting our ability to better address complex, urgent problems. It contains an excellent history, archive of papers, photos and other published resources as well as links to Doug's current projects.

Video Archive MIT / Brown Vannevar Bush Symposium: A Celebration of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Vision, An Examination of What Has Been Accomplished, and What Remains to Be Done. Oct 12-13 1995, MIT. Talks and panel discussion with Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, Andy van Dam, Tim Berners-Lee, Alan Kay and others. See also ACM Interactions summary (free access), transcript of day 1 and day 2 panels.

Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. by Douglas C. Engelbart, October 1962 (SRI AUGMENT, 3906) A work Doug referred to as the bible of his research agenda, it also outlines the motive for his work: enabling groups of people to respond to the increasingly complex and urgent problems of humanity. If you want to read Doug's original works, start here.

More

• And here's what Enterprise 2.0 looked like in 1968
• Flip Test 1971 | Email versus Journal
• Tricycles vs. Training Wheels
• Enterprise 2.0 Schism
• Traction Roots - Doug Engelbart
• Original Traction Product Proposal
• Shaka, When the Walls Fell Doug on the screen in San Francisco. Dealing lightning with both hands.

Reinventing the Web II

Updated 19 Jun 2016 Why isn't the Web a reliable and useful long term store for the links and content people independently create? What can we do to fix that? Who benefits from creating spaces with stable, permanently addressable content? Who pays? What incentives can make Web scale permanent, stable content with reliable bidirectional links and other goodies as common and useful as Web search over the entire flakey, decentralized and wildly successful Web? Here's a good Twitter conversation to read:

60% of my fav links from 10 yrs ago are 404. I wonder if Library of Congress expects 60% of their collection to go up in smoke every decade.

— Bret Victor (@worrydream) June 15, 2014

How the Web was Won

I believe Tim Berners-Lee's original HTTP and HTML protocols succeeded beyond his original vision of a globally scalable, loosely coupled network of Web pages that anyone could edit. The fact that his original protocols were simple, decentralized, and free for anyone to use were essential to success in a world of competing proprietary Internet publishing and commerce "standards" from Microsoft and others. But in my opinion, the Web won by turning permanence and stability into a decentralized economic decision.

Berners-Lee's original W3C protocols appeared at the right time to open clear field opportunities for distributed publishing, marketing, sales and advertising that fueled the Web's growth and evolution. Recapping the argument from my first Reinventing the Web post:

The idea that any sensible person would rely on a global hypertext system where links on one computer pointed at locations on another computer which would break whenever the remote computer was unilaterally moved, renamed, taken off line or abandoned seemed absurd.

The idea that you would have no way to know what incoming links would break when editing or refactoring content seemed just as bad.

The Word Wide Web protocols looked like they would work for relatively small cooperative groups like CERN who could keep things from breaking by having shared goals, and using peer pressure plus out of band communication to keep distributed content alive.

Actually that intuition was pretty good, because the World Wide Web took off in a direction based on other incentives compatible with those assumptions - and grew like crazy because unlike alternatives, it was was simple, massively scalable, cheap and eliminated the need for centralized control.

1) The Web became a distributed publishing medium, not the fabric for distributed editing and collaboration that Tim Berners-Lee and others envisioned. People and Web publishing engines like Amazon created content and kept it online while it had economic value, historical value (funded by organizations), or personal value. Content hosting became cheap enough for individuals or tiny groups. Advertising supported content became "free".

2) Search engines spanned the simple Web. Keeping content addressable now gained value since incoming links not only allowed people to bookmark and search engines to index what you had to publish (or sell), but the incoming links gained economic value through page rank. This provided even greater motivation to edit without breaking links, and to keep content online while it retained some economic, organizational or personal value.

3) People and organizations learned how to converse and collaborate over the Web by making it easy to create addressable content others could link to. The simple blog model let people just add content and have it automatically organized by time. The Wiki model required more thought and work to name, organize and garden content, but also creates stable, addressable islands of pages based on principals that reward cooperative behavior.

4) Search engines, syndication and notification engines built over the Web's simple, scalable protocols connected the Web in ways that I don't think anyone really anticipated - and work as independent and competing distributed systems, making rapid innovation possible.

Tim Berners-Lee made an inspired set of tradeoffs. Almost every concept of value on the Web: search engines, browsers, notification is built over his simple, open, highly scalable architecture.

I believe it's possible to provide what TBL calls "reasonable boundaries" for sharing sensitive personal or organizational data without breaking basic W3C addressable content protocols that makes linking and Web scale search valuable. That should be the goal for social and business software, not siloed gardens with Web proof walls.

Building a better Web over the Web we have

Telephone companies used to call their simplest and cheapest legacy service POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service). I believe it's possible to build a richer and more stable Web over POWS (Plain Old Web Services) without necessarily starting from scratch.

One answer to "who benefits?" and "who pays?" are the businesses who benefit from a richer and more stable Web connecting the systems they use to get work done. Stable fine-grain links and bi-directional relationships connecting systems of record and systems of engagement open the door to business systems that are more flexible, effective, simple to develop, and pleasant to use - more like the public Web than traditional line of business systems.

Museums, libraries, and archives such as Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive, the Library of Congress and others have a mission to collect and curate our cultural heritage and knowledge. The Internet Archive shows how little it costs to collect and index an archive of the content of the visible Web.

Commercial publisher monetize their archive, but have weaker economic incentives to maintain stable links to content outside their own domain.

Commerce sites and providers of consumer-focused Web services may have the greatest economic incentive for deep linking with stable references and relationships spanning devices you own, your home, your health and healthcare providers, your car, your family - and your work, see Continuity and Intertwingled Work.

If I'm right, there are economic incentives for Web content creators to make their work more linkable, visible and useable using straightforward, decentralized, and non-proprietary upwards compatible extensions of Plain Old Web Services.

I believe that indices spanning permalinked locations as well as incoming and outgoing permalink references to content in "stable islands in the storm tossed sea" can be created and maintained in near real time at Web scale, preserving the integrity of links to archival content distributed across the Web.

For example, any domain could publish an index to its permalinked content. Other domains implementing the same protocol could make incoming references to that content by permalink. This is a simple decentralized protocol, no more magical than the published external references that a link editor or dynamic linking system uses to resolve references connecting independently compiled modules of code.

Domains that agree to implement the same protocol, and use permalink (URI) references for content in other compatible domains then have a more stable, decentralized model for permanent links. If domains also publish their own permalink outgoing references (external as well as internal), a Web level service could build and maintain reliable inverted indices of bi-directional internal and domain spanning links. The federation of such domains could be spidered by any number of independently developed services, creating a more stable and useful Web as a decentralized service without breaking the simple Web protocols that every browser and other Web service relies on.

I don't know who has suggested this before; it seems obvious, and is a straw man not a solution. I'm using it to argue that we can and should invent ways to improve the capabilities of the Web using the same simple, decentralized philosophy that made the Web wildly successful versus "better" hypertext systems.

See Michael Peter Edson's Dark Matter essay and my Thought Vectors - Vannevar Bush and Dark Matter response.

Related

Update 19 Jun 2016 See the Internet Archive Decentralized Web Summit, 8-9 June 2016 Locking the Web Open. See videos of the Summit and Brewster Kahle's notes: "Building a web that is decentralized— where many websites are delivered through a peer-to-peer network– would lead to a the web being hosted from many places leading to more reliable access, availability of past versions, access from more places around the world, and higher performance. It can also lead to more reader-privacy because it is harder to watch or control what one reads. Integrating a payments system into a decentralized web can help people make money by publishing on the web without the need for 3rd parties. This meeting focused on the values, technical, policy, deployment issues of reinventing basic infrastructure like the web."

Reinventing the Web (2009) Ted Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee and the evolution of the Web. Ted Nelson wants two-way links, stable transclusion, micropayments. Tim Berners-Lee wants a new Web with open, linked data. I believe that most of what they want can be delivered using the current flakey, decentralized and wildly successful Web as the delivery medium for richer, more stable, more permanent internal models, as stable federations of islands in a storm-tossed sea.

The Internet's Original Sin by Ethan Zuckerman, The Atlantic, Aug 14, 2014. Ethan confesses his role - invention of the pop-up Ad - stating "It’s obvious now that what we did was a fiasco, so let me remind you that what we wanted to do was something brave and noble." He makes a convincing case that the apple in the Web's garden is Investor storytime "... when someone pays you to tell them how rich they’ll get when you finally put ads on your site." A darkly comic but heartfelt essay on the past and future economy of the Web: "It's not too late to ditch the ad-based business model and build a better web"

Intertwingled Work (2010) No one Web service or collection of Web servers contain everything people need, but we get along using search and creative services that link content across wildly different sources. The same principal applies when you want to link and work across wildly diverse siloed systems of record and transactional databases.

Dark Matter: The dark matter of the Internet is open, social, peer-to-peer and read/write—and it’s the future of museums by Michael Peter Edson on May 19, 2014.

Continuity and Intertwingled Work (2014) A level above an Internet of Things: seamless experience across devices for you, your family, your health and trusted service providers, at home and at work.

Reinventing the Web III (2014) followup Twitter conversation with @zeynep, @jeffsonstein, @kevinmarks, and @roundtrip.

The Web of Alexandria (2015) by Bret Victor "We, as a species, are currently putting together a universal repository of knowledge and ideas, unprecedented in scope and scale. Which information-handling technology should we model it on? The one that's worked for 4 billion years and is responsible for our existence? Or the one that's led to the greatest intellectual tragedies in history?"

And Victor's followup post "Whenever the ephemerality of the web is mentioned, two opposing responses tend to surface. Some people see the web as a conversational medium, and consider ephemerality to be a virtue. And some people see the web as a publication medium, and want to build a "permanent web" where nothing can ever disappear. Neither position is mine. If anything, I see the web as a bad medium, at least partly because it invites exactly that conflict, with disastrous effects on both sides."

Update 13 Jul 2014 Added new section headings, added the inline recap and economic benefit examples, added a link to a Jul 2014 Reinventing the Web III Twitter conversation on the same topic.

Update 23 Aug 2014 Added link and brief note on Ethan Zuckerman's fine essay on advertising as the Internet's Original Sin.

Update 29 May 2015 Added links to Web of Alexandria and followup by Bret Victor on why the Web is a bad medium.

Update 19 Jun 2015 Added link to Brewster Kahle's summary of the Internet Archive's Decentralized Web Summit of 8-9 June 2016.

Thought Vectors - Vannevar Bush and Dark Matter

On Jun 9 2014 Virginia Commonwealth University launched a new course, UNIV 200: Inquiry and the Craft of Argument with the tagline Thought Vectors in Concept Space. The eight week course includes readings from Vannevar Bush, J.C.R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, Alan Kay, and Adele Goldberg. Assignments include blog posts and an invitation to participate on Twitter using the #thoughtvectors hashtag. The course has six sections taught at VCU, and an open section for the rest of the internet, which happily includes me! This week's assignment is a blog post based on a nugget that participants select from Vannevar Bush's 1945 essay As We May Think. Here's mine:

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client’s interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient’s reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior.

The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.

This quote is part of a longer section in Bush's essay describing his concept of the Memex, a desktop machine imagined as an extension of 1940's microfilm and vacuum tube technology.

This quote stuck me while reading Michael Peter Edson's essay Dark Matter published on Medium.com in May 2014.

Edson's essay begins "The dark matter of the Internet is open, social, peer-to-peer and read/write—and it’s the future of museums" explaining:

I am talking about museums, libraries, and archives—heritage, culture, knowledge, and memory institutions—and there is really nothing like them on the face of the earth. And whether we’ve realized it or not, my colleagues and I who work with technology in these institutions have been participating in an extraordinary project — the building of a planetary scale knowledge sharing network for the benefit of everyone on earth.

He writes:

Despite the best efforts of some of our most visionary and talented colleagues, we’ve been building, investing, and focusing on only a small part of what the Internet can do to help us accomplish our missions.

90% of the universe is made of dark matter—hard to see, but so forceful that it seems to move every star, planet, and galaxy in the cosmos.

And 90% of the Internet is made up of dark matter too—hard for institutions to see, but so forceful that it seems to move humanity itself.

And it’s not necessarily that the glass of museum, library, and archive technology projects is half empty, as opposed to half full; it’s the fact that the glass of the Internet and the dark matter of open, social, read/write cultural engagement is so much bigger than museums, libraries, and archives are accustomed to seeing and thinking about. And the glass keeps growing at exponential speed, whether we fill it with good work or wait in committee meetings for the water to pour itself…

Edson concludes that museums, libraries, and archives "can play a huge role in the story of how Earth’s 7 billion citizens will lead their lives, make and participate in their culture, learn, share, invent, create, cry, laugh, and do in the future" by going back to Tim Berners-Lee's original vision of the Web, where every person can be a writer as well as a reader.

Cultural Web sites, blogs, Google, Facebook, Twitter and are part of the solution, but Edison's challenge goes beyond that.

I believe there are three parts to his challenge:

The role of trail blazer: Just as Bush suggested in July 1945, I believe there's a need for people to act as explorers, guides, and trail blazers over knowledge they know and love. You can experience that personal knowledge and passion on a tour, at a talk, or in a conversation on a bus, at a party - anywhere you meet someone who loves one of these institutions. I think it's particularly valuable to have trail blazers who are also skilled professionals personally represent and communicate the values, knowledge, and heritage of their museum, just as a great reference librarian becomes a library's ambassador.

The medium: Museums have long had lectures, journals, and newsletters. Most cultural institutions now have web sites, blogs, and Twitter or Facebook accounts, which can be really interesting depending on who does the writing and response. In Dark Matter Edson goes well beyond the comfort zone of most museums into the world of video blogging, Reddit, Pinterest, Tumbler and more. Of the video blogging brothers who created 1,000 plus videos on the YouTube Vlogbrothers channel, Edson writes:

It is evident from watching 30 seconds of any of their videos that they are nerds, and they proudly describe themselves as such. If you announced to your museum director or boss that you intended to hire Hank and John Green to make a series of charming and nerdy videos about literature, art, global warming, politics, travel, music, or any of the other things that Hank and John make videos about you would be thrown out of whatever office you were sitting in and probably be asked to find another job.

The mission: A little less than a year before the end of World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote a letter to Vannevar Bush, asking Bush how to turn the "unique experiment of team-work and cooperation in coordinating scientific research and in applying existing scientific knowledge" during WWII to the peaceful pursuit of scientific knowledge after the end of the war. President Roosevelt concluded: "New frontiers of the mind are before us, and if they are pioneered with the same vision, boldness, and drive with which we have waged this war we can create a fuller and more fruitful employment and a fuller and more fruitful life." Bush responded to then President Harry S. Truman in July 1945, the same month As We May Think was published in The Atlantic Monthly. Bush's report, titled Science the Endless Frontier, lead to the creation of the National Science Foundation.

The Dark Matter mission is different, but it calls on museums and other cultural institutions to rethink how they bring together the heritage they preserve and the broader society they serve. I believe that the skills and passion of trail blazers can help connect the people and the common record of their culture by creating trails that can be seen and built upon now and by future generations. Anyone can now create a trail, and museums should become the richest and most welcoming sources for trail creation. Museums can help by opening up access as well as by creating and curating trails - across all media - as part of their core mission, a unique experiment in team-work and cooperation.

See Dark Matter and Trailblazers - @mpedson and Vannevar Bush for more quotes from Michael Peter Edson's essay, quotes from As We May Think, and President Roosevelt's wartime letter to Vannevar Bush.

Update Oct 30, 2014 See Michael Peter Edson's Internet Librarian International 14 keynote slides, Dark Matter 

Update Jan 21, 2015: See The Museum of the Future Is Here by Robinson Myer, The Atlantic, Jan 20, 2015. A thoughtful redesign of the Smithsonian's Cooper Hewett museum adds a stable URL for every object in its collection, as well as an API for accessing related content.

What the API means, for someone who will never visit the museum, is that every object , every designer , every nation , every era , even every color has a stable URL on the Internet. No other museum does this with the same seriousness as the Cooper Hewitt. If you want to talk about Van Gogh’s Starry Night online, you have to link to the Wikipedia page . Wikipedia is the best permanent identifier of Starry Night-ness on the web. But if you want to talk about an Eames Chair, you can link to the Cooper Hewitt’s page for it ...

“When we re-open, the building will be the single largest consumer of the API,” said Chan.

In other words, the museum made a piece of infrastructure for the public. But the museum will benefit in the long term, because the infrastructure will permit them to plan for the near future.

And the museum will also be, of course, the single largest beneficiary of outsider improvements to the API. It already talks to other APIs on the web. Ray Eames’s page , for instance, encourages users to tag their Instagrams and Flickr photos with a certain code. When they do, Cooper Hewitt’s API will automatically sniff it out and link that image back to its own person file for Eames. Thus, the Cooper Hewitt’s online presence grows even richer.

More

my posts | thoughtvectors.net

Related

As We May Think - Vannevar Bush, Atlantic Monthly, July 1, 1945

Reinventing the Web - Blog post on the creation and evolution of the Web and thoughts on making the Web a more writerly medium based on Berners-Lee's original intent and the vision of Ted Nelson.

Doug Engelbart's copy of As We May Think - with Doug's 1962 notes scribbled in the margins - Blog post also includes links to the Oct 1995 Brown/MIT Vannevar Bush Symposium on the 50th anniversary of As We May Think, with videos of talks and panel sessions.

Doug Engelbart | 85th Birthday Jan 30, 2010 - Blog post celebrating Doug Engelbart's 85th birthday, includes quotes and links to resources. One of the quotes from Engelbart's talk at the Brown/MIT Vannevar Bush Symposium became the tag line for this VCU course:

Doug Engelbart: ... So, moving your way around those thought vectors in concept space - I'd forgotten about that

Alan Kay: You said that, right?

Doug Engelbart: I must have, its so good. [laughter] Its to externalize your thoughts in the concept structures that are meaningful outside and moving around flexibly and manipulating them and viewing them. Its a new way to operate on a new kind of externalized medium. So, to keep doing it in a model of the old media is just a hangup that someplace we're going to break that perspective and shift and then the idea of high performance and the idea of high performance teams who've learned to coordinate, to get that ball down the field together in all kinds of operations.

Continuity and Intertwingled Work

At Apple's WWDC 2014 on 2 Jun 2014, Apple demonstrated how to build a great user experience spanning a your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Apple calls this OS level capability Continuity. It enables you to continue what you're doing across devices and applications by securely encapsulating your identity and the context of your action as an object. From picking up a draft email message started on an iPhone and continuing work with that draft on your Mac, to answering an incoming iPhone call on your Mac, I believe this opens the door for a level of seamless experience that everyone will want for personal use, their family, and at work.

Here’s why. I believe Apple aims to connect:

• Your actions, across the devices you use
• Your family (Family Sharing);
• Your home (HomeKit);
• Your health and healthcare providers (HealthKit);
• Your car (CarPlay) See what Apple is offering via auto OEMs;
• Your work (by extension I'll call this WorkKit) If Apple wanted to play in the enterprise software space. [Apple does want to play, see IBM/Apple Update below - grl]

Regardless of Apple’s intention as a platform for business applications, if Apple succeeds in the personal space, I believe this vision of continuity sets a benchmark for user experience at work, and will kick off a new level of competition to win the attention of enterprise developers and IT departments, working top down rather than bottom up.

1) Apple is using SDK extensions to bridge access to other Apps and OS services. My understanding of the SDK extensions introduced at WWDC 2014 is that personal information and context flows across Apps and iOS services based on extension of the App sandboxing that has kept iOS relatively malware free and consistent. This is critical if you believe that Apple’s strategic goal is to become the trusted, secure home for a fabric of personal information that includes a record of your actions in context. The fabric links you, your devices, your family, your health information, and other things you own or use including your home, car, and what you use at work. The record of actions in context makes it possible to learn, use, and reason about the verbs (actions) and nouns (things) you use every day, including the context in which you use them. It's what I believe is needed to make an Internet of Things usable.

2) Google, Yahoo and others gather correlate, analyze and use personal identity metadata including your location, search history, browsing history to monetize for their own purposes or to sell to others. I believe Apple is trying to build a counter story on security using identity and services encapsulated in devices you own. [Confirmed. See 17 Sep 2014 A message from Tim Cook about Apple’s commitment to your privacy and links below - grl] In addition to continuity, examples include OS8 MAC address randomization for WiFi localization privacy and hardware partitioned storage of iOS fingerprint data.

3) Folk who dislike the Apple’s walled garden and curated applications sometimes fail to acknowledge that many people value a safer, more consistent, curated, and delightfully designed user experience to a toolkit.

4) I want my personal information and keys to access health, home, car, family information stored in a walled garden in a device I own, with gated access looking in for Apps I authorize, and delegated freedom to search, link and use anything I have rights to looking out. Apple appears to be developing its stack top down, starting from a vision of a seamless user experience that just works, giving developers the extensions they need to innovate and prosper.

5) I believe Apple’s principles of continuity and identity are also what businesses need for a safe, secure, consistent, delightful, and productive user experience for people at work, see Intertwingled Work and Work Graph Model: TeamPage Style.

Update 12 Aug 2014

IBM's 15 July 2014 partnership announcement with Apple caught many analysts by surprise. To me, it makes perfect sense as a path to broaden Apple's market. Over the past several years Apple's iOS security, provisioning, and deployment investments removed barriers and eliminated friction for Enterprise customers bowing to Apple as the inevitable Bring Your Own Device of choice. IBM's position as a trusted supplier and developer for Enterprise customers complements Apple's position and focus as your lifestyle hub - for healthcare, home, family, car, and work - and the Internet of Things. I see Google as Apple's only potential competitor. Look for interesting times.

Tbits: Putting IBM MobileFirst in (Apple’s Enterprise) Context Andrew Laurence writes: "Since the iPhone, Apple has developed a subtle enterprise strategy, so subtle that many pundits miss it. Instead of pursuing business sales directly, Apple has quietly worked to remove barriers that might impede usage of its products, including in enterprises. This approach enables Apple to pursue design and user experience while also making its devices more useful to business and fitting enterprise concerns better..."

"Although commonly known as a “computer company,” IBM is really a software and services company, focused on developing and supporting applications for customers. And not only applications, but whole solutions, which requires combining development, hardware, software, management, and more. When a company hires IBM, they also sign on to purchase software licenses; for IBM to supply, manage, and service hardware through its lifecycle; and to purchase support for it all through the life of the contract. The service contract includes not only development of the application if necessary, but also ongoing support and management services: provisioning and deployment, as well as integration of the application and hardware into a cohesive whole to provide a coherent solution..."

For IBM’s customers, the MobileFirst endeavor represents just such an opportunity. Their applications can be developed and deployed on Apple’s popular iOS platform, drawing on IBM’s deep well of enterprise development experience and letting IBM bask in Apple’s reflected glory. I imagine that IBM will get special pricing for Apple products sold through MobileFirst; I also suspect these devices will be provisioned through Apple’s Streamlined Enrollment and tightly managed (via mobile device management policies) through IBM’s Endpoint Manager and MaaS360 products, with software procurement managed through Apple’s Volume Purchase Program."

How IBM could help Apple win one of the biggest markets of all Ryan Faas writes in CITEworld: "Apple's partnership with IBM may deliver more value to Apple than just expanding the iPad's penetration in the business world. Although the partnership will certainly focus on creating business apps, the focus on creating industry-specific apps may boost Apple's fortunes in one of the fields that it is actively seeking to disrupt -- health care."

Update 23 Aug 2014

Apple HealthKit and VRM. A thoughtful essay by Doc Searles. Doc methodically examines Apple's HealthKit from the perspective of Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) principles, goals, and tool requirements - all relating to customers ability to define and manage their own relationship with vendors, rather than vice versa. He finds that HealthKit's principles appear to be an encouraging match, quoting this blog post on "security using identity and services encapsulated in devices you own".

On points 3) and 4) of this blog post, Doc says:

"As a guy who favors free software and open source, I agree to the extent that I think the best we can get at this stage is a company with the heft of an Apple stepping and doing some Right Things. If we’re lucky, we’ll get what Brian Behlendorf calls “minimum viable centralization.” And maximum personal empowerment. Eventually."

Doc see one big unanswered question:

In all cases the unanswered question is whether or not your health data is locked inside Apple’s Health app. Apple says no: “With HealthKit, developers can make their apps even more useful by allowing them to access your health data, too. And you choose what you want shared. For example, you can allow the data from your blood pressure app to be automatically shared with your doctor. Or allow your nutrition app to tell your fitness apps how many calories you consume each day. When your health and fitness apps work together, they become more powerful. And you might, too.”

Update 18 Sep 2014

We're Building Privacy Into Everything You Use Every Day Apple on privacy. The moment you begin using an Apple product or service, strong privacy measures are already at work protecting your information. We build extensive safeguards into our apps and the operating systems they run on. Apple examples include: iCloud; Safari; Maps, Siri and Dictation; Mail; Apps and the App Store; Pay; Health; HomeKit; Spotlight Suggestions; Randomized Wi-Fi Addresses; Security by Design]

A message from Tim Cook about Apple’s commitment to your privacy Quotes:

At Apple, your trust means everything to us. That’s why we respect your privacy and protect it with strong encryption, plus strict policies that govern how all data is handled...

Security and privacy are fundamental to the design of all our hardware, software, and services, including iCloud and new services like Apple Pay. And we continue to make improvements. Two-step verification, which we encourage all our customers to use, in addition to protecting your Apple ID account information, now also protects all of the data you store and keep up to date with iCloud...

A few years ago, users of Internet services began to realize that when an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re the product. But at Apple, we believe a great customer experience shouldn’t come at the expense of your privacy.

Our business model is very straightforward: We sell great products. We don’t build a profile based on your email content or web browsing habits to sell to advertisers. We don’t “monetize” the information you store on your iPhone or in iCloud. And we don’t read your email or your messages to get information to market to you. Our software and services are designed to make our devices better. Plain and simple.

One very small part of our business does serve advertisers, and that’s iAd. We built an advertising network because some app developers depend on that business model, and we want to support them as well as a free iTunes Radio service. iAd sticks to the same privacy policy that applies to every other Apple product. It doesn’t get data from Health and HomeKit, Maps, Siri, iMessage, your call history, or any iCloud service like Contacts or Mail, and you can always just opt out altogether.

Apple picked precisely which parts of the stack should be open, and which it should control, finding the optimum point of leverage.

— Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) September 18, 2014

Apple just went massively negative on Google. This should be interesting. http://t.co/KwczGVIf9t

— Startup L. Jackson (@StartupLJackson) September 18, 2014

Related

Apple's WWDC 2014 Continuity Demo: Identity, Security, User Experience - Storified clipping of the Twitter conversation with @dhinchcliffe @DylanTWilliam and @haydn1701 that motivated this post.

Internet of Everything - Four Questions (with Tweets) - Ron Miller moderated a 20 Jun 2014 Twitter conversation on The Internet of Everything. Ron defined IoE: "For context think of the Internet of Everything as the Internet of Things plus people, process and data." A few Tweets from me specifically related to the topic of this post:

"When I walk into a room, every device and system should know who I am, what I'm interested in, what I can do."

"Not just "May I refill your coffee?" from the coffee pot, but "whoops looks like widget supplier will be late" on ERP wall."

“Device/owner delegates authority to trusted service to securely collect data and act on things on behalf of owner” vs

"Assumes HQ is safe and challenges device in field to prove to what level it and its owner can be trusted"

Software design is taught in the wrong department. Interactive software is a branch of cinema - Ted Nelson, April 2001

Intertwingled Work (2010) No one Web service or collection of Web servers contain everything people need, but we get along using search and creative services that link content across wildly different sources. The same principle applies when you want to link and work across wildly diverse siloed systems of record and transactional databases.

The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style ... the units of work (tasks, ideas, clients, goals, agenda items); information about that work (relevant conversations, files, status, metadata); how it all fits together; and then the people involved with the work (who’s responsible for what? which people need to be kept in the loop?)

A new TeamPage logo, and a new look at Traction Software.com

You'll be seeing the new TeamPage logo here, on Twitter, Facebook, across the Web, and next to TeamPage sites shown in your browser's tabs; I hope you like the it! I also hope you like the the new look at TractionSoftware.com. Our customers believe TeamPage is ideal for work that combines collaboration and action tracking, including quality management, human resources, project work, intelligence analysis, knowledge management, and compliance. We want TractionSoftware.com to tell this story simply and clearly, and we'll continue to improve this site just as we continually improve TeamPage. Please contact us for insights into how customers use TeamPage to get work done, along with a free trial.

Alcoa Tackles IT Projects and Compliance

The IT division of Alcoa Fastening Systems used TeamPage to reduce time spent on compliance activities by 61% and reduce time to deploy IT systems from sixteen months to seven.

Alcoa's TeamPage results are documented in the Deloitte report on Social Software and Business Performance and blog posts by Alcoa employees.

From the Deloitte report

"The paper highlights the experience of one early adopter, Alcoa Fastening Systems, which has significantly improved employee productivity -- achieving a 61 percent reduction in time required for compliance activities -- by leveraging [Traction TeamPage ] social software tools." Deloitte report

Alcoa quotes:

• “Traction Software is the place where informal work gets done.”
• “With Traction Software I can post meeting notes and assign action items to individuals. Then, they can go into the tool and write comments to update the group on the status of their action items as well as post deliverables. It greatly increases transparency and streamlines communications.”
• “What sold me on Traction Software is I realized how it can help me do my job better. Traction helps me get work done faster and allows me to communicate more effectively with my colleagues.”
• “With Traction, people take ownership for their area of expertise on the tool. They provide help to other projects if they have the knowledge needed to contribute.”
• “With Traction, people are pulled in to solve problems based on their expertise on short notice. Before Traction, we simply weren’t able to do this.”
• “Traction has increased transparency around resource allocation and made it easier for managers to find the expertise they need quickly.”

From Brian Tullis, Next Things Next blog posts

"What was our goal? We went from request to live in seven months. A team of techs from the US supported a travel team of analysts. We accomplished a task that normally requires at least 2x the time and many more resources. We did it on time and under budget. The stars lined up for us on this project, but our map was in Traction." Brian Tullis, Enterprise 2.0 and Observable Work: Recap and Speakers Notes

"By consolidating this work in an enterprise social software platform, we eliminated 61% of the work required to maintain documentation, do tests, and inefficient waste time spent searching for information across 7 locations. 61% equates to almost two full time resources." Brian Tullis, Social Software for Business Performance - Some Perspective

See TeamPage Solutions: Quality Management
and TeamPage Solutions: Project Management

Related

Alcoa Fastening Systems: What were you doing at 7:15AM Saturday July 2, 2011? Joe Crumpler was working.

Alcoa Fastening Systems: Forrester Groundswell Award Nomination

Enterprise 2.0 and Observable Work: Brian Tullis and Joe Crumpler, Burton Group Catalyst 2010 Santa Diego

What's Social About Software? | KMWorld 2009 San Jose

Where Collaboration Meets Chess

In 12 Habits of Highly Collaborative Organizations, @Jacob Morgan draws awesome parallels between collaboration strategy and chess strategy:

Chess is virtually an infinite game yet somehow we have grand-masters who are always at the top. How do they succeed in this infinite game? They identify patterns and look for identifiable scenarios. This same approach is applicable for collaboration.

Jacob outlines 12 strategies for successful collaboration. They're numbered but there's no specific order here -- the key is to assimilate these strategies and match them to any as a means to develop the right mix of approaches that will turn a grass roots effort into a collaborative productivity engine for your organization.

These strategies are vital when you seek improvement opportunities with social process engineering. To tackle this grand problem, I like to look first at one working group's key artifacts - whether they are process documents, issues to track, or any other material that passes over your desk regularly - then I start at "6. Integrate into the flow of work" and develop an approach that is supported by the other 11 principles outlined by Jacob.

Thinking like a chess master enables you to make a first tactical move, but do so within a framework that sets you up for success further down the line when use cases are added and new stakeholders must be convinced.

March 2014 | Traction Software Named to KMWorld's 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management

For the tenth consecutive year, KMWorld recognized Traction Software, naming the company to their annual KMWorld 100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management. "Traction Software has proven to define the spirit of practical innovation by blending sparkling technology with a deep, fundamental commitment to customer success," says Hugh McKellar, KMWorld editor-in-Chief. The list is compiled by analysts, system integrators, and a select group of users along with KMWorld colleagues over a one year period.

Greg Lloyd, Traction Software President and co-founder said: "We're honored that KMWorld consistently ranks Traction Software as a company that matters in Knowledge Management. Traction Software employees work closely with customers to build a stronger and more useful TeamPage platform." Lloyd continued, "TeamPage was among the first to use the Web as a platform for work. KMWorld recognized TeamPage's potential very early, and has tracked each stage of its evolution. I thank Traction Software's employees and customers for earning this recognition." See the 2014 KMWorld 100 list.

Dec 2013 | The Wiki Way - Jordan Frank at Gilbane 2013 Boston

What makes the public Social Web work so well? How is social software in the enterprise similar? How is it different? What does a path to success for enterprise social tools look like? Traction Software's Jordan Frank answers these questions in The Wiki Way - Towards Quality, Change and Risk Management as a Path to Enterprise Social Software Adoption (slides below). Jordan's model uses critical core content, critical record / exception management, and critical conversation to establish a base for enterprise social media success. His model shows how social tools can be put into the grain of work, take culture issues off the table, and drive creativity using specific examples. Jordan spoke on the Gilbane Boston 2013 panel, Driving Self Service and Support Through Social Collaboration moderated by Lynda Moulton, Principal, LWM Technology Services.

An Infinite Number of Cats on Keyboards: Ted Nelson & Computer Lib at Homebrew Computer Club Reunion

Order a perfect reprint of the original version of Computer Lib / Dream Machines directly from Ted Nelson, autographed if you wish. Highly recommended.

Ted Nelson's original 1974 edition of Computer Lib / Dream Machines was tour de force on hypertext, personal computers, and more. It was printed tabloid size, with Ted's hand drawn diagrams, neatly scribbled annotations, pasteup text and graphics in a style that has to be seen to be appreciated: think Whole Earth Catalog for computer geeks, film buffs, authors, philosophers, cartoonists, carnival barkers, and children of all ages.

In 1987 Microsoft Press did a good deed by reprinting the book, but chose a standard trade paperback layout which lost much of the charm.

The 1974 edition printed by Hugo's Book Service in Chicago has two front covers (one for Computer Lib and one for Dream Machines). Both books share the same binding, and you flip to read in either order. An original edition sells for over $250 when you can find a copy.

Read a fine essay and authorized sample from Computer Lib / Dream Machines as well as other classics at New Media Reader Excerpts, by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (Editors), MIT Press 2003.

In Nov 2013 Ted announced that you can order a perfect reprint directly from him for $100 including US postage ($108 for California residents).

See Mark Graybill's blog post on meeting Ted at the Homebrew Computer Club Reunion, 11 Nov 2013.

Here's the back of the Computer Lib flyer including payment address, terms, and email ordering address:

Ted Nelson speaks at the HomeBrew Computer Club Reunion, 11 Nov 2013 (YouTube video)

Update: On April 24, 2014 Chapman University hosted INTERTWINGLED: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson. The conference "examined and honored the work and influence of this computer visionary and re-imagined its meaning for the future". Speakers include: Belinda Barnet, Dame Wendy Hall, Alan Kay, Ken Knowlton, Jaron Lanier, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. Concluding remarks by Ted Nelson. See conference session videos.

Update: Intertwingled, The Festschrift-- Ebook celebrating Ted Nelson Day at Chapman University, 2014 (Springer-Verlag) (via @TheTedNelson, 12 Jul 2015) A free Springer ebook edited by Douglas R. Dechow and Daniele C. Struppa. Chapters by Alan Kay, Brewster Kahle, Belinda Barnet, Ken Knowlton, Dame Wendy Hall, and others. Closing chapter What Box? by Ted Nelson. I highly recommend this book.

An Infinite Number of Cats on Keyboards: Ted Nelson & Computer Lib at Homebrew Computer Club Reunion A blog about computer programming and the teaching of programming.

Ada Lovelace Day | Marissa Ann Mayer, Software Engineer, Product Manager, and Executive

Ada Lovelace Day celebrates the contributions of women in science and technology, follow @FindingAda for news and events. This year I've chosen to write about Marissa Ann Mayer Software Engineer, Product Manager, and Executive, currently President and CEO of Yahoo! Over her career Ms Mayer earned exceptional recognition for Computer Science teaching (while working for her Stanford degrees), software engineering, design, product management, and her executive skills. Ms Mayer joined Google as employee number twenty in 2009 and played an instrumental role leading Google Search for over 10 years.

In 2013 Ms Mayer ranked 31 in the Forbes Magazine list of the World's 100 Most Powerful Women, and the first woman listed as number one on the Fortune Magazine's annual list of the top 40 business stars under 40 years old.

Quoting from her Yahoo! biography: "During her 13 years at Google, Marissa held numerous positions, including engineer, designer, product manager, and executive, and launched more than 100 well-known features and products. She played an instrumental role in Google search, leading the product management effort for more than 10 years, a period during which Google Search grew from a few hundred thousand to well over a billion searches per day. Marissa led the development of some of Google's most successful services including image, book and product search, toolbar, and iGoogle, and defined such pivotal products as Google News and Gmail. She is listed as an inventor on several patents in artificial intelligence and interface design.

Prior to joining Google, Marissa worked at the UBS research lab in Zurich, Switzerland and at SRI International in Menlo Park, California. She graduated with honors from Stanford University with a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and a M.S. in Computer Science. For both degrees, she specialized in artificial intelligence. While at Stanford, she taught computer programming to more than 3000 students and received the Centennial Teaching and Forsythe Awards for her contributions to undergraduate education. In 2008, the Illinois Institute of Technology awarded her an honorary doctorate of engineering."

"Companies with the best talent win." Marissa Mayer, CEO Yahoo!

Ada icon by Sidney Padua Download the Thrilling Adventures of Babbage & Lovelace for your iPad (free). Enjoy their adventures, backstory and more on author Sydney Padua's 2D Goggles Web page.

Previous years

Ada Lovelace Day | Sunita Williams, Astronaut and Captain U.S. Navy 2012

Ada Lovelace Day | Betts Wald, US Naval Research Lab 2011

Ada Lovelace Day | Fran Allen, IBM Fellow and A.M. Turing Award Winner 2010

Ada Lovelace Day | Professor Lee S. Sproull, Stern School, NYU 2009

The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style

Justin Rosenstein wrote an excellent option piece for Wired, The Way We Work Is Soul-Sucking, But Social Networks Are Not the Fix. Justin begins: "With Twitter’s recent IPO filing, the most popular graph dominating conversation is the “interest graph.” Before that, it was the “social graph,” courtesy of Facebook. But we’re now seeing the emergence of a third important graph: the work graph." The work graph term is new - and useful - but I believe the model dates back to Lotus Notes and even Doug Engelbart. In this blog post I'll review Justin's definition and use it to describe Traction TeamPage's work graph model. I'll also show how TeamPage leverages its work graph model to meet challenges of information overload, work with external as well as internal teams, and work that needs to span siloed systems of record.

Work graph defined

"...A work graph consists of the units of work (tasks, ideas, clients, goals, agenda items); information about that work (relevant conversations, files, status, metadata); how it all fits together; and then the people involved with the work (who’s responsible for what? which people need to be kept in the loop?).

The upshot of the latter data structure is having all the information we need when we need it. Where the enterprise social graph requires blasting a whole team with messages like “Hey, has anyone started working on this yet?”, we can just query the work graph and efficiently find out exactly who’s working on that task and how much progress they’ve made. Where the enterprise social graph model depends on serendipity, the work graph model routes information with purpose: towards driving projects to conclusions." Justin Rosenstein, Wired 9 Oct 2013

Just so!

TeamPage's work graph

TeamPage watches what you do, and automatically maintains two-way links and relationships as you edit, keeping an accurate version history of everything so you can easily see what changed, when, and who did what.

TeamPage's work graph automatically connects articles, comments, status messages, tasks, milestones, projects, links, shared references, and relationships stored in TeamPage to the TeamPage profile of the person who created, edited or tagged the work, along with a time stamp for the action.

This concept of a work graph is helpful in describing what TeamPage automatically creates and maintains as you work.

But what counts is how TeamPage uses its work graph model to cut clutter, make it much easier to work with people anywhere inside or outside your organization, and make files and records already in IT systems easily accessible to get work done.

The same work graph information is organized and presented two different ways: by person, or by unit of work. This enables TeamPage to show activity feeds, dashboards and calendars of people, linked to the work they created or edited, as well as activity feeds, dashboards, and calendars for specific tasks, projects, and spaces where many people work together.

Dealing with information overload - use the work graph to add context to de-clutter activity streams, navigation and search

You can start by creating a new task directly attached to any paragraph in a TeamPage article. TeamPage links the task and paragraph to make it simple to see what the task is about, in the context of the original meeting notes, spec, or question that kicked off the followup action. You don't need to explain much to define the task, because the task has a direct link to the original source - in context - making it much easier for anyone to come up to speed. Or just click the New Task button to create an independent task.

No more fumbling through your own email, hoping that the person you're working with can find their own copy of the right email or file, or wasting time sending copies to people who just realized they don't have the right stuff. Send a link to any TeamPage task or other item by email or your favorite messaging system when you want to talk about a complicated item during a phone call or video chat.

You can collect a set of tasks to manage as a named Project, and use name Milestone to specify common Start or End dates for related tasks.

You can focus on any specific project or collaboration space and see its dashboard and activity stream without irrelevant noise and clutter. You can also zoom out to a birds eye view which shows a dashboard, activity stream, or calendar view spanning everything you have permission to read. Or click any person's profile to see a dashboard, activity stream, or calendar view focused their work units and actions (clipped to what you're allowed to read).

You can shift your focus whenever you want. You can also watch any article, task, project, or other unit of work and get an automatic email or inline notification when it changes or is commented on. Click on the link in the message to zoom back to that context, or simply reply to the email notification to add a comment in the right place. Or subscribe to TeamPage's email digest for an automatically generated daily summary of activity with links you can click through to read more or reply.

Working with external and internal teams - use permission rules to clip what the work graph lets you see

TeamPage's work graph model includes permissioned access that automatically clips content to show just those work items, relationships, and search results each person is allowed to read.

This makes it simple to use TeamPage for work that can cross boundaries, linking customers, suppliers, partners and internal teams with different permissions to different business activities on the same TeamPage server.

TeamPages' work graph model allows you to put a private comment (or task) in a more private space where it's only visible to a smaller group. For example, an internal team discussion on a customer's question.

Typically each external client has a private space (like separate clients of a law firm), and internal team members have a birds eye view across all clients and most or all internal spaces. TeamPage makes it simple to set up granular access rules for spaces based on individual names, Active Directory, LDAP, or TeamPage group membership.

There's one TeamPage work graph connecting all internal, external, public and private content. Permission based filtering of TeamPage's work graph happens automatically and efficiently at a very deep level whenever activity stream, dashboard, comment thread, or search results are shown to any person. This technology is covered by Traction Software's US Patent 7,593,954.

With TeamPage you don't have to stand up multiple systems and juggle posts, conversations, and tasks across multiple social software silos to work with customers, clients, partners or internal teams working on different activities with different permissions.

Extending the work graph to content on the public Web, Intranet pages, and siloed systems of record.

TeamPage's Social Enterprise Web enables you to share, tag, task or comment on any page your browser can see on the public Web or on your private intranet. Just install TeamPage's Web browser plug-in extension for modern browsers including Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

The Social Enterprise Web also lets you add a TeamPage share button (like Facebook or Google+ share buttons) or comment box (like Disqus) to any public or intranet Web page your organization controls. Comments are stored in TeamPage , and link back to the external Web page, which is treated as part of the TeamPage work graph.

As a bonus, the content of a page linked to TeamPage with the browser plug-in, share button, or comment box is automatically indexed for TeamPage search and drill down navigation.

The Social Enterprise Web makes pages on the public Web or your organization's intranet simple to see, share, find and connect to TeamPage tasks. A task or question on an internal purchase order page can tracked and used part of TeamPage's work graph without complicated or expensive custom integration.

For example, add a TeamPage comment box to an Purchase order page in a Web based ERP system by adding a JavaScript snippet, and see something like this:

TeamPage's Attivio Plus option enables you to extend the TeamPage work graph to content stored in your organization's SharePoint, Documentum, File server or SQL Database applications.

You can then search, share, task, tag or comment on any work item in these external systems, making live external transactions part of your TeamPage work graph, including integrated TeamPage and external content analysis, search and navigation.

The Attivio Plus option scales to handle very large external content stores using Attivio's world-class AIE technology along with a simple deployment model and licensing that's both flexible and affordable.

Contextual Computing At Work:

"In the world of work, I believe it's incredibly valuable to capture and connect the natural objects of your attention and interest, including tasks, projects, work product, relevant discussion, related references even if you're standing in for Siri or Google Now.

When Mr. Dithers shouts: "Bumstead! Where are we on the Acme Account?", the most timely, frequently discussed and contextually relevant version of Dagwood's Acme tasks, projects and work should pop up near the top of the result list, along with the cloud of tags and people who have touched or talked about tasks, projects and other related to the Acme account and its associated activity streams.

The important requirement is making tasks, projects, pages, discussions and other work products first class sharable, named objects that can be connected to each other and what you're working on, discussed, tagged, tasked, and navigated as well as found using search. Being able to talk about tasks and projects relating to Acme captures one important part of your interest and behavior graph (activity stream), and links these items to the names and behavior of other people working with or discussing the same objects.

The objects and connections made in the context of work are more reliable than connections that need to be inferred from your behavior - and they're available now, including the ability to connect tasks, projects, pages and discussion in TeamPage and files, discussion, email and SQL databases in your external systems of record. They record valuable context for Siri and Google Now when used at work - but there's no reason to wait to get started."

TeamPage examples

How to make your ISO Auditor Smile; And Make Your Professional Life Much Easier Use TeamPage to create, edit, view work instructions from concept to shop floor, tracking every part qualification and compliance issue and notifying everyone when a significant change has occurred so they can read about and adopt the new procedure on their own. Result: a happy and productive team, and a smiling ISO auditor.

Zoom in to focus, zoom out for awareness, bubble up items in the flow of work TeamPage shows dashboard, activity stream, and calendar views of any project, task, milestone when you want to focus on a specific action, or zoom out to get a dashboard that shows a birds eye view of all business activity (based on what each person has permission to read). You can also click to any person's TeamPage profile and see a dashboard, activity stream, or calendar view of all of that person's actions (based on what each person has permission to read).

Contextual Computing At Work Peter Morrison argues that the future or work isn't mobile, it's contextual: "Always-present computers, able to sense the objective and subjective aspects of a given situation, will augment our ability to perceive and act in the moment based on where we are, who we’re with, and our past experiences. These are our sixth, seventh, and eighth senses." The objects and connections made in the context of work are more reliable than connections that need to be inferred from your behavior - and they're available now, including the ability to connect tasks, projects, pages and discussion in TeamPage and files, discussion, email and SQL databases in your external systems of record. They record valuable context for Siri and Google Now when used at work - but there's no reason to wait to get started.

The Future of Work Platforms: Like Jazz When you watch a skilled team in action, it's like watching a great jazz group - there are themes, there is structure, and there are limits, but a team shines in individual excellence combined with coordination, improvisation, innovation, handling exceptions, and seemingly effortless awareness of where others are and where they're headed. The TeamPage action tracking model focuses on making it simple for individuals and teams to plan and coordinate the daily, weekly and monthly activities that drive effective teamwork, with task that can be pinned directly to any paragraph of a TeamPage article or comment.

Extending the fabric of work, or How to Be Emergent A question found in a customer email stored in Exchange, an issue with a new drug application filed in Documentum, a fact in a legacy document stored in SharePoint or a File server S: drive, a record in an SQL database can all be discovered, discussed, tagged, and tasked for follow-up action in TeamPage without converting or importing data from its original source. Systems of record look and act like they are part of the same permission-aware TeamPage fabric used for collaboration, communication, and action tracking in the flow of daily work.

Intertwingled Work Observable work can (and should) crossing silos and systems. Business context makes observable work easy to find and use. Functionally specialized transactional systems in an organization will likely remain silos of structured information - but market forces will drive vendors to make their content addressable using simple Web standards and services - with consistent authentication and visibility based on context dependent business rules.

A Fabric, not a Platform Apple and Google are competing to build a fabric that connects everything you own and use, working outward from the globally meshed supercomputer people now carry in their pockets. Both are applying deep learning technology to AI assistants, and opening up their AI's and bots to other app, bots, and cloud services reachable through their fabric. This richly connected fabric makes bots useful and AI assistants valuable by teaching them how to identify objects you're talking about as well as what you want done. The same applies at work. Making this happen requires a shift from the traditional definition of a platform to a fabric which makes it possible to connect people and the actionable objects they use, in context

Three primary knowledge domains: intelligence, dialog records, and knowledge products Want to talk about work graphs? Here's how Doug Engelbart dreamed up and build the first hypertext system to link work units and people with the NLS/Augment software, starting in 1968 (no typo). See Remembering Doug Engelbart, 30 January 1925 - 2 July 2013

Original Traction Product Proposal Original proposal from October 1997, including Traction business case and references, released under Creative Commons license.

Related

Dec 2015 | Quality Management, Signature Requirements - Adds Feedback, Non-Conformance, and Corrective Action forms and dashboards to TeamPage's standard support for authoring, sharing and tracking updates to quality and compliance documentation.

Oct 2015 | Personal Worklists, Quick Forms - Track and share what you plan to work on. It's easy to add, rearrange, organize, checkoff and share items on your personal worklist.

July 2015 | TeamPage Live Task Lists - Shared task lists keep everyone in synch on order of execution for tasks as well as planned start and end dates.

May 2015 | TeamPage Bookmarks, interactive filters, and Japanese search improvement - Focus on what interests you; return to any filtered or standard view with one click.

March 2015 | TeamPage 6.1 Burn-up charts, interactive tables, SDK extensions - Track progress and summarize activity in context.

Dec 2014 | TeamPage @ Mentions - Bring an article, comment, status post or other object to someone's attention by typing their name.

July 2014 | TeamPage Notifications - Inline and email notifications. Watch what interests you, reply inline or by email.

Sept 2013 | KMWorld names TeamPage a Trend-Setting Product of 2013

On Sept 1, 2013 KMWorld recognized Traction Software's TeamPage as a Trend-Setting Product of 2013. KMWorld editor Hugh McKellar writes: "The common thread running through all the products listed here is the unique value—and potential value—they offer the organization, its workers and their various constituencies." Traction Software is honored that KMWorld has again selected TeamPage as a Trend-Setting Product. TeamPage customers such as Athens Group show the value of an integrated Quality Management system, industry knowledge base, and training curriculum. TeamPage enables Athens Group to train and support a rapidly growing cadre of expert consultants helping customers design, construct, and operate safe, reliable drilling rigs and platforms around the world. Read KMWorld Trend-Setting Products of 2013

Related

Athens Group - Traction TeamPage for Quality Management, Training and Knowledge Base

How to make your ISO Auditor Smile; And Make Your Professional Life Much Easier

Jordan had a conversation with a TeamPage customer in Sweden who agreed to document and publish a TeamPage case study, but the ISO auditor story is too good to wait. The customer is small precision machined products manufacturer. They initially supplied prototypes to the Swedish defense industry, but now focus on precision products for heavy vehicle manufacturers.

The company is ISO/TS 16 949 certified for Quality Management, ISO 14 001 certified for Environmental Management, and rightly proud of their reputation for producing high quality products and close cooperation with their customers. They use TeamPage for their Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP) process and Product Part Approval Process (PPAP). When the conversation took place, they had moved 90% of their procedures and shop floor work instructions from Microsoft Word to TeamPage. This gave everyone in the company live access to TeamPage procedures, for quick reading, search, moderated editing, ECO, and issue tracking from concept to shop floor.

Then the ISO auditor paid a visit:

"We had an audit last week and because we have incorporated about 90% of our procedures in TeamPage and also having the output from them in TeamPage our auditor was freakin' ecstatic. I demoed the 'Add' button for sections and a template article and I see his jaw drop. Pretty funny to see, these guys are very seldom impressed.

We also use TeamPage for work instructions read/used mainly by 40 machine operators. We also post news about new work instructions and change information on updated ones.

Earlier the same day the auditor came to see us we received a customer complaint. That is serious stuff in our line of business. I wrote an 'Quality Alert' in TeamPage (based on a template) and in this particular Quality Alert there were a few things that the operator needed to do and inspect so that we are again able to supply parts within customer specifications.

The auditor picked-up on this immediately when he arrived. I showed him the procedure written in TeamPage, the Quality Alert in TeamPage and the updated work instructions in TeamPage. He said “Good, but have you talked to the operators?” and I said “No, I don't need to. I would have but I have been to busy preparing for this audit”. He walked directly to the machining area and started interrogating operators. I was grinning, he looked surprised. It was amazing. All operators knew exactly what they were supposed to be doing, the information distribution and the Quality Alert simply worked. It always works.

• Thank you Traction Software for making my professional life so much easier."

You're very welcome!

The quotes are from our Quality Manager contact (used with permission), writing in that company's space on Traction Software's TeamPage server. A company space is used to work with Traction Software folk privately, versus posts made to one of the Forum spaces shared by all TeamPage customers, friends, and Traction Software employees.

See TeamPage Solutions: Quality Management

Related

Decagon Devices: Plans, Products, Projects, Procedures and ISO 9001 Quality Management

Athens Group - Traction TeamPage for Quality Management, Training and Knowledge Base

The Future of Work Platforms: Like Jazz

Enterprise 2.0 Schism

Remembering Doug Engelbart, 30 January 1925 - 2 July 2013

I was very sad to learn that Doug Engelbart passed away at his home on 2 July 2013. Doug had a long life as a visionary engineer, inventor, and pioneer of technology we use every day - and technology where we're just starting to catch up to Doug and his SRI team in 1968. Doug had a quiet, friendly, and unassuming nature combined with deep knowledge, iron will, and a determination to pursue his vision. His vision was to aid humanity in solving complex, difficult and supremely important problems; Doug's goals were noble and selfless. The sense of dealing with an Old Testament prophet - a kindly Moses - is perhaps the greatest loss I and countless others who have met and been inspired by Doug feel today. I've written frequently about Doug in the past, and I'll continue to do so. Here are a few remembrances and resources that seem appropriate. I'll update this list over the next several days. Farewell Doug and my sincere condolences to his family and many friends.

“Someone once called me ‘just a dreamer’. That offended me, the ‘just’ part; being a real dreamer is hard work. It really gets hard when you start believing in your dreams.” — Doug Engelbart, Dreaming of the Future, Byte, September 1995.

Press and public valediction

DOUGLAS C. ENGELBART, 1925-2013 Computer Visionary Who Invented the Mouse John Markoff, New York Times, 3 July 2013. "It was his great insight that progress in science and engineering could be greatly accelerated if researchers, working in small groups, shared computing power. He called the approach “bootstrapping” and believed it would raise what he called their “collective I.Q.”"

In Memoriam: Douglas Engelbart, Maestro of the Mouse and So Much More Harry McCracken, Time, 3 July 2013. "Engelbart was able to see things that most people couldn’t, and make them real. But he was also a passionate believer in what he called Collective IQ — the ability of teams to do things that lone guns cannot.

Computing pioneer and GUI inventor Doug Engelbart dies at 88 Dylan Tweeny, VentureBeat.com, 3 July 2013. "Although Engelbart is often referred to as the inventor of the mouse, that’s a bit like saying Henry Ford was the inventor of the steering wheel. The mouse was a clever invention, but it was merely one component of a larger vision of how computers could increase human intelligence, or what Engelbart called our collective IQ."

Doug Engelbart, visionary Robert X. Cringley, I Cringley, 3 July 2013. "To most people who recognize his name Doug Engelbart was the inventor of the computer mouse but he was much, much more than that. In addition to the mouse and the accompanying chord keyboard, Doug invented computer time sharing, network computing, graphical computing, the graphical user interface and (with apologies to Ted Nelson) hypertext links. And he invented all these things — if by inventing we mean envisioning how they would work and work together to create the computing environments we know today — while driving to work one day in 1950."

Chris Nuzum's fine valediction for Doug: "RIP Doug Engelbart, and thank you. For taking the time to walk a few miles after dinner in 1995 with a young admirer, for your urgent encouragement to do something about my ideas, for your generosity with your time in providing feedback and encouragement, and for the lifetime of work your poured yourself into with boundless enthusiasm and determination. Your inspiration lives on." See photo

Douglas Engelbart's Unfinished Revolution Howard Rheingold, MIT Technology Review 23 July 2013. "To Engelbart, computers, interfaces, and networks were means to a more important end—amplifying human intelligence to help us survive in the world we’ve created. He listed the end results of boosting what he called “collective IQ” in a 1962 paper, Augmenting Human Intellect. They included “more-rapid comprehension … better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insoluble.” If you want to understand where today’s information technologies came from, and where they might go, the paper still makes good reading."

Engelbart's First, Second and Third Order Problems. Jonathan Stray's 4 July 2013 Twitter valediction, a Storify collection with some links expanded. "First order is doing. Second is improving the doing. Third is improving the improving."

If you truly want to understand NLS, you have to forget today. Brett Victor wrote A few words on Doug Engelbart 3 July 2013 in honor of Doug Engelbart life and passing. A few very well chosen words. A Storify collection with a few links expanded and quoted.

"The least important question you can ask about Engelbart is, "What did he build?" By asking that question, you put yourself in a position to admire him, to stand in awe of his achievements, to worship him as a hero.

But worship isn't useful to anyone. Not you, not him. The most important question you can ask about Engelbart is, "What world was he trying to create?" By asking that question, you put yourself in a position to create that world yourself."

Doug Engelbart Resources

DougEngelbart.org: The Doug Engelbart Institute was was conceived by Doug Engelbart to further his lifelong career goal of boosting our ability to better address complex, urgent problems. It contains an excellent history, archive of papers, photos and other published resources as well as links to Doug's current projects.

Douglas Engelbart Interviewed by John Markoff of the New York Times Outracing the Fire: 50 Years and Counting of Technology and Change Computer History Museum oral history interview, March 26, 2002.

Doug Engelbart Video Archive: 1968 Demo - FJCC Conference Presentation Reel Dec 9, 1968 Internet Archive, the so called Mother of All Demos. See also From Pranksters to PCs chapter about Engelbart's 1968 FJCC demo from John Markoff's book What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, authorized excerpt.

Video Archive MIT / Brown Vannevar Bush Symposium: A Celebration of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Vision, An Examination of What Has Been Accomplished, and What Remains to Be Done. Oct 12-13 1995, MIT. Talks and panel discussion with Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, Andy van Dam, Tim Berners-Lee, Alan Kay and others. See also ACM Interactions summary (free access), transcript of day 1 and day 2 panels.

Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. by Douglas C. Engelbart, October 1962 (SRI AUGMENT, 3906) A work Doug referred to as the bible of his research agenda, it also outlines the motive for his work: enabling groups of people to respond to the increasingly complex and urgent problems of humanity. If you want to read Doug's original works, start here:

By "augmenting human intellect" we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insoluble. And by "complex situations" we include the professional problems of diplomats, executives, social scientists, life scientists, physical scientists, attorneys, designers--whether the problem situation exists for twenty minutes or twenty years. We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human "feel for a situation" usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids. 1a1

Man's population and gross product are increasing at a considerable rate, but the complexity of his problems grows still faster, and the urgency with which solutions must be found becomes steadily greater in response to the increased rate of activity and the increasingly global nature of that activity. Augmenting man's intellect, in the sense defined above, would warrant full pursuit by an enlightened society if there could be shown a reasonable approach and some plausible benefits. 1a2

Traction Software Blog posts

Tricycles vs. Training Wheels Jon Udell writes: "Easy-to-use computer systems, as we conventionally understand them, are not what Engelbart had in mind. You might be surprised to learn that he regards today’s one-size-fits-all GUI as a tragic outcome. That paradigm, he said in a talk at Accelerating Change 2004, has crippled our effort to augment human capability." Doug's discussion with Alan Kay at the 50th Anniversary of As We May Think (including links).

Traction Roots - Doug Engelbart Elements of Doug's work that directly inspired Traction TeamPage, what we do, and how we work. A personal remembrance.

Original Traction Product Proposal - Annotated references and appendices on the work of Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson.

Flip Test 1971 | Email versus Journal Doug Engelbart's Journal versus email - an alternate history.

And here's what Enterprise 2.0 looked like in 1968 | Dealing lightning with both hands... The 1968 Mother of All Demos and John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said

Enterprise 2.0 Schism Doug Engelbart and Peter Drucker are the two patron saints of Enterprise 2.0. And why.

Doug Engelbart | 85th Birthday Jan 30, 2010 Doug Engelbart's mission, goals and accomplishments, including a dialog with Alan Kay at the 50th Anniversary of As We May Think symposium.

Doug Engelbart's copy of As We May Think - with Doug's 1962 notes scribbled in the margins From the Doug Engelbart digital archive (see links). Original donated to the Computer History Museum.

Happy Birthday Doug Engelbart! Video highlights from Doug's talk and panels at the 50th Anniversary of As We May Think symposium, Oct 1995. Videos of Doug's talks including his famous Dec 1968 Mother of All Demos are now part of the Doug Engelbart Digital Archive maintained and managed by The Internet Archive

Decagon Devices: Plans, Products, Projects, Procedures and ISO 9001 Quality Management

Decagon Devices (Decagon.com) designs, manufactures and markets scientific instruments used to measure water, light and heat in the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum. Decagon devices are used by 80% of the top one hundred food companies to measure water activity in food; by farms to measure soil for water and nutrient use; and by NASA where Decagon devices were sent to Mars to measure humidity and wind. Decagon deployed TeamPage for project management, ISO certification of their procedure management, internal corporate communications and knowledge management.

Decagon Devices Grows Up

About 12 years ago Decagon needed to transition from a small family start up - founded in 1983 and managed by Dr. Gaylon Campbell and children - to a company that supports many families. Decagon is now at 120 employees and growing. Tamsin Jolley, past president, and current president Scott Campbell are Gaylon's children.

It remains important to the founders that Decagon keeps its core commitment to customers and quality, as well as a unique family-friendly company culture which earned Decagon Wall Street Journal Top Small Workplaces recognition in 2008.

This lead to Decagon's Lean initiative, leveraging ISO certification as a driver to document tribal knowledge, making continuous improvement part of everyday work, and chart he company's future.

Decagon Deploys Traction TeamPage

The team at Decagon deployed Traction TeamPage in December 2008 and expanded TeamPage use to include everyone in the company. Uses include:

• Company-wide information sharing
• Product Management
• Project Management
• Change Management
• Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) and Training

Company-Wide Information Sharing

Decagon opens up TeamPage to all employees and their daily work. This includes a consistent flow of headlines, trip and meeting reports, healthcare updates and key new employee information. An Employee Spotlight section adds a personal element and reinforces Decagon's core value: maintaining a tight knit employee community.

Product Management

Each Decagon product has a space in TeamPage. Product research and development are tracked from R&D through a phase-gate process to Phase 3 release and finally to Production and product updates.

Product development goes beyond basic tasking to include capturing discussion and key actions throughout a product's lifetime. In the example (left), you see the TeamPage dashboard for the Aqualab product. This gives a bird's eye view of everything from design specs to marketing materials, phase gate reviews, meeting notes and team member roles. This makes it easy to keep up to date or bring a new team member on board.

Project Management

Company-wide projects are also managed in TeamPage. One example is Decagon's transition to Lead Free / RoHS compliance. This company wide initiative required Decagon to eliminate use of lead in all products. The Lead Free Initiative spanned several years, requiring careful attention and involvement of key people from different parts of the company at different stages. The Lead Free TeamPage space at Decagon offers easy access to artifacts that are created throughout the initiative, including cleanliness reports, board meetings notes, and test outcomes.

Change Management

Decagon established a set of simple core processes to support its efforts to improve efficiency and quality in all areas of the company:

• Corrective and preventive actions (CAPA)
• Engineering change orders (ECO)
• Failure analysis (FA)
• Audits

Decagon is an "all-hands" company, taking suggestions from everyone to maintain an open, inclusive culture. Anyone in the company can submit a request to change a process, fix a problem, enhance a product, or audit a system. These requests are submitted using TeamPage templates. Each submission moves through the submitted, active, completed (or discontinued) phases marked with tags in TeamPage. CAPA Change Management applies to all processes of the company, not just product development and support.

The Decagon-wide change management space is called CAPA. It has two key elements. First, a simple template for CAPAs and ECOs. Second, a CAPA dashboard used to submit a change request. The Add button pops up a TeamPage template developed by Decagon that's easy for anyone to understand and track as it moves through the CAPA process.

Templates are easy for Decagon to change because each is based on a standard TeamPage article that's copied as the starting point for a new article with the push of a button. When the template is filled in and posted, it appears in one of the Submitted sections on the CAPA dashboard. The employees involved in evaluating changes can then manage their work and move changes through the CAPA process.

TeamPage comment features make it easy to discuss suggested changes and allow anyone to chime in if they have further ideas or concerns about a potential change.

Standard Operating Procedures and Training

Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) describe Decagon procedures in Marketing, Sales, Administration, Customer Support as well as Engineering and Operations. As part of Decagon's Quality Management initiative, all SOPs are now written, reviewed and used as living TeamPage articles. Printed copies of standard operating procedures, work instructions and similar materials are considered obsolete.

Training procedures are also managed in TeamPage. A Training Matrix by area/department identifies training needed. Training facilitators and managers use TeamPage add notes to certify when training was completed and who was trained.

Edit history makes it easy to see what version of an SOP was used to train any given employee

The SOP dashboard shown at above breaks out standard operating procedures by department or function. TeamPage's draft review process is used to review and discuss work in progress revisions before a change update is approved. Changes to a SOP may be made in response to issues raised or changes proposed by CAPAs; if so, the CAPs and SOP are linked in TeamPage. SOPs become living documents, including a record of discussion and rationale explaining how the SOPs evolved.

Decagon Dashboards and Attivio Search

TeamPage dashboards organize information for one-click navigation based on tags, article types, and other selectors you control using TeamPage's Section Editor. For information that isn’t on a Dashboard, the Attivio Search option adds simple, yet exceptionally powerful search and content navigation across everything in TeamPage, including content, documents, tags and user profiles. Faceted navigation makes it easy to navigate or refine search results by article type, author, date and automatically recognized key phrase, person, company name, location and other attributes.

The combination of TeamPage Dashboards, search, and content navigation makes everything in TeamPage much easier for people at Decagon to find and use as part of an ISO 9001 process versus scattered email, spreadsheets, and documents stuffed in file servers or hidden on each person's computer.

ISO 9001 Certification for the TeamPage Quality Management System

Decagon Devices recently completed a three year renewal of their ISO certification. Their certification recognizes “their quality management system demonstrated in conformance with ISO 9001:2008.” TeamPage is at the heart of the quality management system. Decagon's ISO 9001 certificate is posted into their Quality Management System space along with other key lean manufacturing (LMS), Quality Management and ISO related information and meeting agendas.

Decagon Devices Gets Productive With TeamPage

Company wide information sharing, product management, project management, SOPs and training, and ISO compliant quality management are all good individual use cases for Traction TeamPage. When you combine all of these uses for a single company, the benefits really multiply. TeamPage Profiles, personal notification, and personal Task summaries are directly connected to the collaboratively created plans, specifications, SOP's and other procedures that make ISO 9001 Quality Management work well and deliver high quality, successful products and services.

Decagon uses TeamPage with Attivio search as a complete collaboration, action tracking, search and change management solution for administration, sales, marketing, and support as well as engineering and product development processes. TeamPage helps Decagon run their business the way they want it to run, as a high quality, innovative, successful, and employee friendly company.

See TeamPage Solutions: Quality Management

Pharma and Biotech Risk Management

Risks are the leading cause of costly delays in the process of bringing a biotech product to market. Risk management in the product development process all too often means one person juggling a list of risks in a spreadsheet. It's hard to edit, but even harder to open a discussion on an existing risk when someone has a question, sees a problem, or wants to add a new risk. Traction Software partner Rosemary Vu used TeamPage's Section Table widget and extended TeamPage's Article to create a Risk form. For more on TeamPage Section Tables, see Q: How do I link to an Excel file? A: Why Would you Do That?

Here's an example of a Section Table of Risks, including risk type, module, hazard, cause, severity, likelihood of occurrence, and other attributes.

Unlike a spreadsheet, you can easily expand and comment on any entry in the table. Click the Add button to add a new Risk to the table and raise the Risk form. Rosemary created the Risk form as a specialized extension of a TeamPage article, inheriting all standard TeamPage comment, task, tag, edit history, search and activity feed capabilities, while adding editable attributes as pulldown choices or fill in the blank field. Like other TeamPage extensions the Risk form is packaged as a plug-in to make extension installation, sharing, and maintenance very simple. Rosemary created the Risk form on her own with no IT help or programing experience by incrementally modifying a free plug-in example from Traction Software's SDK Forum Library.

Here's an editable view of the third Risk:

The TeamPage Risk form has fields, pulldowns and a free text description that makes it very easy to enter and edit. Risk values are formatted in a way that makes them easy to read when a Risk is shown as single Teampage article (below) as well as when a Risk is referenced in a Risk table.

Using TeamPage to manage Risks makes it easy for anyone to submit a risk, update a risk, and comment on the issues associated with it. TeamPage's extensible and customizable architecture makes it possible for a power user with no programing expertise to extend Teampage, and easily share that extension with other TeamPage customers. Rather than relying on just one person to manage all risk information in a spreadsheet, the whole team gets involved and plays a part in identifying and resolving risks. Accountability is raised and communication is much more efficient. TeamPage's easy extensibility makes risk management in biotech and other similar tasks in other domains clearer, easier, faster, and more effective.

Working Across Boundaries

In his Jun 2, 2013 blog post, Chess Media analyst and author Jacob Morgan asks: How Open is Too Open? He asks "Would you be comfortable working in an all glass building where people can see everything you do and every move you make?" Jacob outlines the benefits of transparency: "Keep everyone on the same page; Build trust and fostering better relationships; Allow employees (and customers) to contribute ideas and value when they see the opportunity to do so." Jacob recognizes that a balance needs to be struck, but not being transparent enough may do more harm than good. He ask: "How open is too open?" I agree with the benefits Jacob outlines, and believe the answer to Jacob's question depends on the answer to a critical question: "Transparency for what purpose?" I'll start the ball rolling in with this post, including some real-life customer examples.

For example, if you work for a consulting (or law) firm, your clients have a strong, natural expectation that their work with the firm will be kept private from other clients, even if client work is more broadly shared internally among members of the firm. Some work within the firm may be more closely held for good reason - ranging from employee health records to Board meeting minutes. I believe it's a mistake to limit collaboration to work that must be visible by all members of the firm. I also believe it's extremely valuable to work with external clients, suppliers, and partners as well internal teams, within and across necessary and natural boundaries. The question I'd like to discuss is: "How do you balance transparency, boundaries, and the need to work across boundaries?"

Jacob recognizes that a balance needs to be struck, and uses an analogy that compares a glass building vesus "a regular building that just doesn't have locked doors."

"I do believe that organizations need to be much more open and transparent but there’s a balance that needs to be struck here. There’s a big difference between showing everything to everyone vs making things open to people should they want to see it. To use an analogy it’s the difference between constructing a glass building vs constructing a regular building that just doesn’t have locked doors." - How Open is Too Open?

I'd say "very few locked doors, where needed to get work done, particularly with external stakeholders."

In an early Three Places for People blog post, I use a similar analogy:

"Great architects of physical places know that people bring expectations and norms about the kind of behavior that's appropriate and enjoyable to any physical space. Architects are skillful in designing spaces to match their clients desires and expectations by providing cues that are easy to perceive and appropriate for the intended purpose, but a lot of the norms of the same physical space become clear only from social context.

If you walk into a conference room with a group of people you don't know talking quietly around a table - and someone closes the door behind you - you'll likely speak and act differently than if you walk into the same room with people you know laughing, eating and drinking. If you walk into a theater you'll probably seat yourself quietly in the audience rather than striding onto the stage (see the Re-Placing Space reference).

What fascinates me about social software is how we're learning to create places with perceived affordances - features and user models - that seem natural for different purposes and intentions. I use Facebook, Traction Software's TeamPage server, and Twitter as three separate places: my neighborhood, my workplace, and the public commons I like to use." - Three Places for People

One Traction TeamPage customer matches the consulting firm / client example precisely. The firm is near the top of the list of 100 global firms in their market. They use separate TeamPage spaces for each client, but allow members of the consulting firm to work across all client spaces. Members of the firm use TeamPage's project, task, milestone or client space dashboards to focus, and can also step back to a bird's eye view across all activity that they are permitted to see, organized by Space or by Person (with activity stream, project, task and milestone tabs on each individual's Profile). See Action Tracking, Project and Case Management in TeamPage

Another Traction TeamPage customer provides services to customers worldwide, with over 5,000 employees operating in over 150 locations and 75 countries. The firm uses TeamPage to get new clients onboard; author and share client and location specific procedures; track and communicate status including response to weather conditions and other forces that require changes to planned procedures. Shared access to procedures, notifications, and changes build strong business relationships that are a competitive advantage for the firm. Tens of thousands of complicated procedures need to be constantly changed and reviewed in near real time by both the firm and clients. The shared procedures are the core operating plan for the firm and the basis for everything the client values and pays for. TeamPage dashboards, notification, action tracking and search provide simple, reliable and secure access for each client, while allowing members of the firm to maintain global awareness, diving into any project, task, or space to quickly resolve an issue or come up to speed, see Deep Search.

In summary, I believe there's no reason to settle for a collaboration and action tracking solution that only handles internal collaboration, or assumes that everything happens in a building with glass walls and no doors. Real business value and sustainable competitive advantage often depends on working easily within and across boundaries that need to be in place to do business.

Related

The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style - Working with internal and external teams

Borders, Spaces, and Places - Walks through specific examples of boundaries and boundary crossing activity

Explaining Twitter - One of Three Places for People - About the social architecture of three places: 1) a public commons (like Twitter); 2) a place for friends and family (like Facebook); 3) a place where you work (for me, Traction Software's TeamPage server).

Intertwingled Work - Working across siloed systems and boundaries set up to meet business purposes - like the consulting firm client example.

A Circle is not a Space - How Google+ circles make it possible to share individual conversations with a list of circles each individual controls (later extended to groups) versus sharing work within one or more spaces. Some distinctions are important to understand when you want to handle collaboration for a business or other purpose over an extended period of time.

June 2013 | Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software Industry Report, Redwood Capital

A new Redwood Capital Group industry report released the first week of June 2013 focuses on Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software. The thirty-two page report includes Market Trends, Competitive Landscape, M&A Activity, Private Financing, Valuation Trends, and Emerging Private Companies, including Traction Software. You can download a free copy of this and related industry reports from the Redwood Capital Sector Focus page.

Download and read the full report for carefully drawn analysis and insights on Market Trends and Competitive Landscape in Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software as well as detailed summaries of relevant M&A and investment transactions for 2010-2012.

A few Market Trends and Competitive Landscape highlights:

From Overview

"Socialization and collaboration technologies are currently reshaping the established enterprise collaboration market as well as creating whole new categories of offerings, especially around private social platforms. In addition, many other enterprise applications such as CRM and unified communications are heavily transformed through the incorporation of new technologies including group messaging & activity feeds, document collaboration, and analytics. Much of this change is being driven by the consumerization of IT and the incorporation of social technologies. As businesses look to leverage the benefits of improved “connecting” and “network building” that employees have experienced with Facebook and other social solutions, a convergence is occurring between the enterprise social software and collaboration markets..."

"It is important to think of socialization and collaboration, not just as point solutions, but rather as activities that encompass a wide range of functionalities that can be incorporated into many enterprise applications. Further, we think the idea of “social networking” for the enterprise has given people the impression that these applications are simply chatty online versions of the proverbial water cooler. In fact, many tasks and projects that must be completed in a business context require connecting and collaborating with other works both inside and outside the enterprise. The concept of “social software” in this regard is really around providing a software platform that helps coordinate these connections around a work activity (such as processing a customer complaint or processing a claim or new account, which requires both connecting with other works as well as completing certain documentation. As a result, private social platforms simply provide a useful means for workers to comment, share, collaborate and follow the flow or completion of a project or task."

"Later is this document, we discuss the differences between people-centric platforms vs document centric platforms. While some platforms may truly be document centric (such as an online whiteboarding platform) or people centric (such as a CRM related application), we suspect that over time, many platforms will integrate the concept of both the social as well as the document management side to provide solutions that significantly improve the efficiencies with which workers can perform their daily activities."

From Market Growth

"While the enterprise social and collaboration software sector is experiencing substantial growth, as with any new, emerging area, trying to get an accurate estimate of the market size or potential, is challenging. A recent report by IDC estimated that “enterprise social networks and collaboration” will grow from $800 million to $4.5 billion by 2016. While this certainly implies robust growth, we believe there are a number of relevant categories the IDC study did not include, such as project management software and certain vertical-oriented solutions, which only make the opportunity that much larger. Project management and vertical solutions are particularly important sectors as we expect players focusing on specific industry verticals or functional areas to offer highly compelling ROI propositions to CIOs and thus remain competitive against the larger, horizontal platforms offered by established enterprise software vendors."

from Competitive Landscape

"Since the offerings from players in the enterprise social and collaboration sectors include a wide range of differing features, it can be difficult to compare the competitors and their platforms and even determine the categories in which they really compete. Further, the terms “collaboration” and “social software” are used with widely different meanings, each often with the intent of including the other. However, socialization and collaboration are different, and while being closely related, involve different functionalities. In order to help break down the space, we find it useful to look at the core focus of an application. In general, most solutions fall into two core areas of focus: document-centric or people-centric."

Document Centric

"Document-centric offerings are based on collaboration, content or data sharing, or presenting content (documents, files, presentations). Players in this area often fall into categories traditionally thought of as “collaboration”..."

Key Document-centric subcategories: Group Collaboration Workspaces, Project Management Systems, Electronic Calendar and Time Management; Online Proofing & Editing; Mind-mapping and Diagramming; Conferencing. [see report for subcategory descriptions]

People Centric

"People-centric solutions are focused on human interactions and are designed to make these interactions more productive. While people- centric offerings may include some document- centric tools, their core focus is on human interaction..."

Key People-centric subcategories: Private Social Platforms; Social Task Management; Social CRM; Peer Review & Ideation; Other Social Tools [see report for subcategory descriptions]

On Social Task Management: "Social task management, while similar to document-centric project management solutions, is a people-centric distinction. Many private social platforms are essentially focused on task management so this category is also perhaps just a slight narrowing of the broader private social platform concept discussed in the point above. While many of the tasks workers perform focus on a document, email or form, much of this work is often done in collaboration with others. As collaboration and private social platforms integrate these two aspects, many project or task management systems become as much people-centric as document-centric."

For more information, please contact the author:

Russell Crafton, Partner
rcrafton@redcapgroup
Redwood Capital
885 Third Avenue, 25th Floor
New York, NY 10022
redcapgroup.com

Related

May 2013 | Getting Work Done with Social Task Management

May 2013 | TeamPage listed as key product in Technavio's Global Enterprise Social Networking Market Report

7 May 2013 | Real Story Group's Updated Traction TeamPage Evaluation in Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software Report

7 Oct 2011 | Jacob Morgan - Emergent Collaboration Vendor Review: Traction Software

Blog1883: Laser focused E2.0, without the risk? Get Traction!

18-19 Jun 2013 | Traction Software E2 Boston 2013 Social and Collaboration Track Sponsor

Traction Software is happy to be a Social and Collaboration Track sponsor at this year's E2 Boston Conference. Please visit Traction Software at Demo Pavilion 38 to see how customers build better products and work better together using Traction TeamPage. Traction Software is a leader in social task management and a consistent innovator in delivering business value to demanding customers around the world. Learn how John Hagel of Deloitte documented and analyzed a TeamPage customer's 61% reduction in time required for compliance activity using TeamPage.

When you visit the Demo Pavilion you can also get a free copy of Jacob Morgan's excellent book: The Collaborative Organization: A Strategic Guide to Solving Your Internal Business Challenges Using Emerging Social and Collaborative Tools, see Greg's Amazon review. We'll give away twenty-four copies to people who: 1) Ask for a free copy of Collaborative Organization by Tweeting a request to @TractionTeam before Monday 17 June, and 2) Show up in person and claim your book, first come, first served.

E2 Boston conference is at the Boston Marriott Copley Place in downtown Boston, 17-19 June 2013. Register with priority code CMTRACTION and be our guest for a free Keynote and Expo Pass or save $200 on full registration. The Keynote and Expo Pass entitles you to attend keynote and free sessions, visit the Demo pavilion including the 5:30 to 6:30PM cocktail reception Tuesday and Wednesday. Hope to see you there!

For Traction E2 Boston updates, follow @TractionTeam on Twitter. To pre-schedule a meeting with Jordan Frank or Greg Lloyd at E2 Boston, please email e2boston@tractionsoftware.com, use Traction's contact form, or shout out to @TractionTeam on Twitter.

See www.e2conf.com/boston for event details and registration.

Open Cafe: E2.0 Implementation and Adoption

@JeffMerrell posed a series of questions for his Master's Program in Learning & Organizational Change. I'll offer my own experience as it pertains to each of his question areas.

Question Area: Implementation of new social technology platforms

When stepping into E2.0, there's a temptation to go enterprise wide while also wanting to meet a specific need and show success. Invariably, it's easier to define a specific need for a small group and get adoption there at the "local" level. In my own experience and with customers, the same pattern is generally evident: Shooting for instant enterprise adoption is OK for short-lived processes like an idea jam while long lasting adoption with sustained return occurs when a small group identifies a "process" need and organizes around that.

I think the sweet spot occurs when a particular group's collaboration can benefit an entire organization. Over at Athens Group, there was a need for a focused group to put together process and training information which was valuable on an on-going basis to all their consultants. I've also seen this pattern with competitive intelligence use cases.

Question Area: Adoption of new social technology (by individual users)

Jeff asks what tells you when you've hit a tipping point. For sure that's when a super-user says "my customer's stats just passed my own!" That happened recently at site of a consulting company using TeamPage for their customer requirements and project implementation tasking.

Motivating adoption is always tricky, no matter how good the tool. But organizing spaces around a space dashboard clearly identifies what's important is critical. Then folks can understand where the value is found, and how to play along.

I talk about this in Emergineering which focuses on meeting the freedom required by collaboration with a simple structure that encourages it.

As for incentives, they're questionable since motivation is better when it comes from within. See Blog2031: Problem and Process rather than Incentives for E2.0 Tools

Question Area: Formal and informal community management

We all wish communities would manage themselves. One problem with communities is they aren't necessarily directed towards a particular goal. In a sense, communities are optional. So, the key is to figure out how it can sustain itself.

One of my earliest customers was a pharmaceutical division of a Fortune 100. They pushed they had a competitive intelligence need which was a terrific basis for building communities by market area.

There were 25 individuals which were easily identified as being involved in sharing and developing competitive and market intelligence with another easily identified set of managers. We were able to setup spaces by market area. Information was posted to the market area communities rather than through individual emails. The result was a vibrant pattern of communication which not only increased efficiency, but created greater awareness across the division and even showed some instant gains as a wider set of people could validate and amplify the key intelligence, e.g. a case of a competitor working on a new drug which a scientist was able to indicate would fail based on their own internal experiments.

In this case, the community managed itself by running user group meetings on a regular basis to check their progress and improve the quality of their information gathering based on surveys and reactions of key management and sales constituents. They also wrapped their management objectives around participation.

Question Area: Measuring activity, outcomes and value in social technology platforms

Activity and value can be attacked through efficiency, adoption and any number of other metrics. They aren't always obvious, and the outcomes aren't always predictable when you get started.

At one Pharmaceutical firm, it was evident the system was providing value when usage metrics increased after roll-out and leveled out to a consistent pattern. At that point, it was clear from behavior that it was delivering value and had hardened as an organization process. See page 10 of the PDF attached to Blog119: Thierry Barsalou, IPSEN CIO, Speaks at Gilbane Conference on Content Management.

At Alcoa Fastening Systems, a Deloitte study highlights a 62% reduction in time spent on compliance activities. There's a case where compliance was converted from a chore to something that just happens along the course of getting work done!

Question Area: Knowledge sharing to learn as well as to perform

I think the term knowledge development hits the mark closer than knowledge sharing. Knowledge development happens in the course of documenting processes, policies, and FAQs. This is a Wiki type approach where you develop and refine knowledge over time. This is the case in the Athens Group study mentioned above. Some customers have even received ISO certification for their process of managing process and training documentation. Having these core information assets makes leverage easier to achieve when questions are asked and current procedures are challenged by new opportunities for improvement.

Contextual Computing At Work

In Co.Design May 24, 2013 Peter Morrison of Jump Associates writes The Future of Technology isn't Mobile, it's Contextual. He says that the way we respond to the world around is based on situational awareness. "The way we respond to the world around us is so seamless that it’s almost unconscious. Our senses pull in a multitude of information, contrast it to past experience and personality traits, and present us with a set of options for how to act or react. Then, it selects and acts upon the preferred path. This process--our fundamental ability to interpret and act on the situations in which we find ourselves--has barely evolved since we were sublingual primates living on the Veldt.

Here’s the rub: Our senses aren’t attuned to modern life. A lot of the data needed to make good decisions are unreliable or nonexistent. And that’s a problem.

In the coming years, there will be a shift toward what is now known as contextual computing, defined in large part by Georgia Tech researchers Anind Dey and Gregory Abowd about a decade ago. Always-present computers, able to sense the objective and subjective aspects of a given situation, will augment our ability to perceive and act in the moment based on where we are, who we’re with, and our past experiences. These are our sixth, seventh, and eighth senses."

Peter argues that we need four graphs to make contextual computing work:

• The Social Graph - how you connect to other people and how they are connected to one another, including the nature and emotional relevance of those connections.
• Your personal graph contains (gulp) all of your beliefs - data relating to a your deepest held beliefs, core values, and personality.
• The Interest graph - what you like - is about curiosity
• Your behavior graph - sensors that record what you actually do versus what you claim you do

I agree that one great value of Peter's contextual computing is to make agents like Apple's Siri or Google Now much more effective in answering questions, making recommendations, and delivering what you want based on how you express it in your own words or gestures, taking into account your current situation, recent requests and interests. But this augments a more fundamental capability: human content navigation, including but not limited to search.

In the world of work, I believe it's incredibly valuable to capture and connect the natural objects of your attention and interest, including tasks, projects, work product, relevant discussion, related references even if you're standing in for Siri or Google Now.

When Mr. Dithers shouts: "Bumstead! Where are we on the Acme Account?", the most timely, frequently discussed and contextually relevant version of Dagwood's Acme tasks, projects and work should pop up near the top of Dagwood's result list, along with the cloud of tags and people who have touched or talked about tasks, projects and other related to the Acme account and its associated activity streams.

The important requirement is making tasks, projects, pages, discussions and other work products first class sharable, named objects that can be connected to each other and what you're working on, discussed, tagged, tasked, and navigated as well as found using search. Being able to talk about tasks and projects relating to Acme captures one important part of your interest and behavior graph (activity stream), and links these items to the names and behavior of other people working with or discussing the same objects.

The objects and connections made in the context of work are more reliable than connections that need to be inferred from your behavior - and they're available now, including the ability to connect tasks, projects, pages and discussion in TeamPage and files, discussion, email and SQL databases in your external systems of record. They record valuable context for Siri and Google Now when used at work - but there's no reason to wait to get started.

Related

• The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style
• Zoom in to focus, zoom out for awareness, bubble up items in the flow of work
• Intertwingled Work
• Enterprise 2.0 and Observable Work
• Traction TeamPage: Connected Work
• TeamPage Action Tracking with Tasks, Milestones, and Projects

Join us at E2 Boston 2013 - Traction Software is Social and Collaboration Track Sponsor

How well you work with your colleagues, online and off, will make the difference when trying to win the next deal, design the next product or craft the next winning strategy. Consider how important people are to process and how social collaboration (versus some pre-ordained workflow) is the barrier to or the enabler of successful outcomes. We see immense value when people document their knowledge, streamline their communication and track actions to completion in TeamPage. We hope you can join us to see TeamPage and learn from the leading analysts and practitioners at E2 Boston June 17 through 19.

Traction Software is a track sponsor this year for the Social and Collaboration Track. The sessions range from Going Beyond the Activity Stream to the Rise of the Connected Workplace and Evaluating Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise.

Please visit the E2 Social and Collaboration Track site to learn more and register for this upcoming event. There are other tracks on Big Data, Cloud, Mobility, UX, and People, Process and Engagement. That's a lot to learn in a few short days!

Register with discount code CMTRACTION to earn $200 off Full Event Passes, $100 off Conference registration, or a FREE Keynote + Expo Pass.

May 2013 | TeamPage listed as key product in Technavio's Global Enterprise Social Networking Market Report

Traction Software Inc (along with its Traction TeamPage product) has been recognized as a key player in TechNavio's upcoming report on the Global Enterprise Social Networking market 2012-2016. TechNavio analysts forecast "the Global Enterprise Social Networking Software market to grow at a CAGR of 51.94 percent over the period 2012-2016." They continue: "one of the key factors contributing to this market growth is the increased requirement of intranet interactivity among multiple teams in an organization. The market has also been witnessing an increased use of mobile enterprise social networking for sales activities. However, the risk of confidential information leakage could pose a challenge to the growth of this market."

This requirement for intranet interactivity and confidentiality led Traction Software to offer TeamPage in in both cloud hosted and easily deployed on-premise forms. For the intranet use case, the need for information security led Traction Software to introduce a moderation capability with TeamPage 4.0. The trend toward increased teamwork was a driver for TeamPage's deeply integrated action tracking and project management starting with TeamPage 5.1, extended to task, tag, discuss and share information stored in external line of business systems as well as the public web and private intranets.

To learn more about the Technavio report, please visit Global Enterprise Social Networking market 2012-2016. The PDF will be available in June.

May 2013 | Getting Work Done with Social Task Management

Alan Lepofsky @alanlepo of Constellation Research coined Social Task Management last summer to describe a trend he saw in December 2011 as task management started to enter Enterprise 2.0 systems. Lepofsky's presentation at E2.0 Boston 2012 highlighted Traction TeamPage as a social business platform with a native (versus integrated) task management (slide 34). Luis Suarez @elsua does a fantastic job of summarizing key points in Social Task Management - When Social Business Got Down to Work. Later in the year (October 2012), Constellation Research published Lepofsky's research as Getting Work Done with Social Task Management. The research speaks to problems with traditional standalone task management systems which create top down choke points, lose context, limit collaboration and create information silos. Lepofsky argues that collaboration is at the core of social task management while describing the many benefits.

You can learn more about how Tasks work within the social and collaborative fabric of TeamPage in Action Tracking and Social Software: Meet Project Management (a post on Traction Software's initial project management capabilities released with TeamPage 5.1 in November 2010). The TeamPage Project Mastery Video is also a terrific introduction to TeamPage's social task management model. See also Greg Lloyd's The Future of Work Platforms: Like Jazz from February 2011.

7 May 2013 | Real Story Group's Updated Traction TeamPage Evaluation in Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software Report

The Real Story Group's Kashyap Kompella @kashyapkompella posted an update describing RSG's new version of their Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software Evaluations research covering twenty-five key software vendors. The new version includes a major update for the Traction TeamPage section, including TeamPage project management, action tracking, TeamPage's ability to span and connect systems of record, and the ability to embed TeamPage discussions in other Web applications.

Kompella remarks that TeamPage is unique in that it's "best thought of as a platform to build custom collaboration applications around interconnected pieces of information." Check out Kompella's blog post, and follow the links to get the full report.

Our experience with customers reinforces the Real Story Group analysis of broad TeamPage scenario fits and strengths, including the ability to configure TeamPage to match the needs of specific business use case and organizations. TeamPage's architecture and Traction Software's experience make it simple to configure TeamPage in days - not weeks or months - and easily extend TeamPage as desired.

See also Jordan Frank's Laser focused E2.0, without the risk? Get Traction! blog post on Real Story Group's E20 Marketplace Analysis.

Lost Roots of Project Management: Think Agile that Scales

The Manhattan Project, Atlas, and Polaris projects are cited as roots for traditional phased stage-gate Project Management, but didn't use that model. New high innovation projects shouldn't either; think agile that scales. Read this fascinating 2009 paper by Sylvain Lenfle and Christoph Loch of INSEAD, cited on Twitter by Glen B. Alleman who calls it "breathtaking".

Lost Roots : How Project Management Settled on the Phased Approach (and compromised its ability to lead change in modern enterprises) 
Sylvain Lenfle and Christoph Loch, 2009/59/TOM
INSTEAD Research Working Paper

Quoting from Introduction:

“Modern” Project Management is often said to have begun with the Manhattan Project (to develop the nuclear bomb in the 1940s), and PM techniques to have been developed during the ballistic missile projects (Atlas and Polaris) in the 1950s. The Manhattan Project “certainly displayed the principles of organization, planning and direction that typify the modern,management of projects.” “The Manhattan Project exhibited the principles of organization, planning, and direction that influenced the development of standard practices for managing projects.”

This characterization of the roots of PM represents a certain irony – the Manhattan Project did not even remotely correspond to the “standard practice” associated with PM today, and both the Manhattan and the first ballistic missile projects fundamentally violated the phased project life cycle: both applied a combination of trial-and-error and parallel-trials approaches in order to “stretch the envelope”, that is, to achieve outcomes considered impossible at the outset.

However, the Project-Management discipline has now so deeply committed itself to a control-oriented phased approach that the thought of using trial-and-error makes professional managers feel ill at ease. In our seminars, experienced project managers react with distaste to the violation of sound principles of phased control when they are told the real story of the Manhattan Project (or other ambitious and uncertain projects). The discipline seems to have lost its roots of enabling “push the envelope” initiatives, de facto focusing on controllable run-of- the-mill projects instead.

How could this happen? And does it matter? In this paper we describe how the discipline lost its roots and we argue that it matters a great deal: it has prevented the project management discipline from taking center stage in the increasingly important efforts of organizations to carry out strategic changes and innovation.

Related

Update Feb 6, 2016: See Glen B. Alleman's Herding Cats blog post, Agile at Scale - A Reading List (Update 9)

The Future of Work Platforms: Like Jazz - The social dance of getting things done, dealing with exceptions, and staying aware of what’s going on around you

Intertwingled Work - Working and scaling like the Web

Big Data, Meet Long Data, Meet Blog Data

Big Data Meet Long Data by Jeff Bertolucci - @jbertolucci - column appears this week in InformationWeek to reminds us that "Long Data" or historical data is vital for analysis and comprehension of trends that span years.

Bertolucci's article links to a Wired article from January 2013 titled Stop Hyping Big Data and Start Paying Attention to ‘Long Data’ where the author, Samuel Arbesman - @arbesman - says "Big data puts slices of knowledge in context. But to really understand the big picture, we need to place a phenomenon in its longer, more historical context."

Bringing this home to a company's context, Bertolucci quotes Benjamin Bruce (Pitney Bowes - Marketing Director) as saying "Big data is more about taking a slice in time across many different channels" and that "long data involves looking at information on a much longer timescale. Ignoring customer data and records that go back decades can limit a company's ability to connect with its customers."

Taking a long-data trip back to May 2008 brings us to a quote from Now Everything is Fragmented by Dave Snowden - @snowded - in KMWorld where he said:

"Over the last decade as I have worked on homeland security, we have had the chance to run some experiments that show that raw field intelligence has more utility over longer periods of time than intelligence reports written at a specific time and place. In other experiments, we have demonstrated that narrative assessment of a battlefield picks up more weak signals (those things that after the event you wished you had paid attention to) than analytical structured thinking."

He continues with explanation: "we live in a world subject to constant change, and it’s better to blend fragments at the time of need than attempt to anticipate all needs." Amen.

So when you leave data on the chopping block after completing an analysis, you are denying the next person an opportunity to go back to the raw data and run their own analysis, possibly for the same or different purposes.

I'll assert that what's needed is the thin slicing in big data concepts combined with the long data trends that allow for understanding change and gathering some picture of the future.

Bringing this back to "blog" data - thats where we can capture the vital narrative that Snowden says carries the weak signals. The blog data helps to annotate the context where big data lives.

Blog data in a TeamPage demo also offers a simple and easy example to explain the importance of thin slicing over long trends. Here is a tag cloud from one of my demo servers. It's set to All Time. The tags tell a story, of sorts. Interpret it as you may.

Now, when we use a date selector control, we can see it tells a very different story in 2012 vs. 2011.

Date Selector: Year 2010	Date Selector: Year 2011

In the example, you can see the company's attention has shifted from competitors like Nike and Vibram in 2010 to competitors like Merrell in 2011. It also looks like they've done less work with Policy work in 2011 and have shifted away from HUMINT (human intelligence collection).

This sort of tag cloud view offers a pretty blunt view across a whole server or a particular space at a time. Greater precision is often required. Another way to slice the content is with our premium search which is powered by Attivio's Active Intelligence Engine. You can search for any set of words and get a tag cloud for the search, then even slice that into a time period or by any other facet or set of tags.

In this search interface, Attivio also helps us extract and display tag cloud style views of any facet, including keywords, spaces, content authors, and more. From the keywords facet, you can quickly see there are 5 hits on Marathon Training and Injury Prevention.

This brings us to Small Data. Once we can thin slice small, relevant, data, we can quickly assess what topics are prominent even before digging in to read the source content or more quickly understand trends.

A thick slice across all time isn't adequate to explain a course of events - a long view with thin slices and supporting narrative is vital. With all this, you might take a long music trip back to the 80s and You May ask Yourself How Did I Get Here? ...and actually come to a good answer!!

Or, if you want to consider more thought provoking ideas about tags, other meta data and the role of time, please click over to my Tag Mush presentation linked at the bottom of Ontologies & Tagsonomies at Taxonomy Boot Camp to read more about the Information T.

This Information T model talks directly to the importance of Long Data, Big Data and context from Blog Data.

1 March 2013 | Traction Software Named to KMWorld's 100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management

For the ninth consecutive year, KMWorld recognized Traction Software by naming the company to their annual KMWorld 100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management. KMWorld’s list is compiled by KM practitioners, theorists, analysts, vendors, their customers and colleagues. This is the 13th year of the list. "Criteria for inclusion varies, but all companies have things in common. Each has either helped to create a market, redefine one or enhance one, and they all share two things—the velocity of innovation and the agility to serve their customers" says Hugh McKellar, KMWorld Editor-in-Chief.

Greg Lloyd, Traction Software President and co-founder said: "We're honored that KMWorld consistently ranks Traction Software as a company that matters in Knowledge Management. Traction Software employees work closely with customers to build a stronger and more useful TeamPage platform." Lloyd continued, "Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter 2012 TeamPage releases introduced many user interface, performance, and Developer SDK additions and improvements to make it easier for customers to get work done. I thank Traction Software's employees and customers for earning this recognition." See the 2013 KMWorld 100 list.

TeamPage 2012 highlights include:

• Unified search to make lookup of spaces, people, projects and tasks quicker and easier;
• Type-ahead completion for navigation, with optional index based type-ahead suggestions for content search; uniform work in progress autosave and finish later actions to avoid accidental loss of work;
• Invitations to make it simple for members of a space to add new people to a TeamPage space by sending them an email invitation;
• An inline widget to collect and summarize selected tags, dates, and other standard or custom properties from all types of TeamPage content, making it easy to create dynamic tables for task summaries and other uses;
• New calendar event support to manage meetings and other dated activities along with project, task, and milestone dates;
• Drag-and-drop editing of TeamPage calendar events;
• Improved synchronization and notification for TeamPage and external calendar items;
• Improved email digest, print, RSS, and Atom view styling, detail and context cues; improved Active Directory integration and caching;
• Streamlined navigation header, dashboard, calendar and document tab interfaces;
• JMX-based metering of TeamPage server state;
• Improved iPad, iPhone and Android support;
• Performance improvements;
• Twitter style status that can focus on a selected project, milestone or task, as well as birds eye summaries organized by space or person.

Problem and Process rather than Incentives for E2.0 Tools

Over on Quora, Ben Lopatin @bennylope has a best-answer to a question on the best ways to incentivize people to use E2.0 knowledge management and collaboration. He starts by shunning external incentives (as I do in Need for Incentives, and other Innovation Myths) and works through a few key principles which I've seen work time and time again:

• Focus on the problem for which the tools are to be employed. Most people don't care about enterprise wikis, they care about being able to do their jobs,
• Provide people with a working demonstration of an existing business process.
• Actively help people figure out how their processes, tasks, etc, can be accomplished with the new tools
• Get people up the ladder using the new tools... if you want to achieve pan-organization adoption you need leadership to show that they're using it, too
• Be careful about overestimating how easy the tools are for everyone. And not just the interfaces, but changes in underlying concepts.

I wish I had an Blog1326: Emergineering! badge to put on this answer because it captures the essence of understanding the problem and underlying process, figuring out how to address it in a way that enhances productivity, and finally getting the organization around the new approach. That's just what's needed for folks to figure out how to turn "social software" into "social productivity software" and really start using these tools for more than very basic and fleeting conversation.

I'd also hand out the badge to Catherine Shinners @catshinners for amplifying the benefits of social process transformation.

In her notes from the E2.0 Innovate conference, she wrote:

There are specific benefits of a social business process:

• immediacy - better access to the information
• serendipity - enabling discovery of new information
• transparency - supporting honest and ethical behavior through openness

A business process does not become social simply because it's in a social network. Hughes called out the different types of social business processes

• unstructured processes – the opened ended “hey I've got a question does anyone know the answer” or easy invitational “why don't we?” kind of interactions
• semi-structured – direct queries to engage a constituency or cohort in a group conversation or comment about artifacts i.e., “please review or provide feedback”
• structured – business process workflow kinds of structure “approve my expenses - request time off”

Beyond simple productivity gains of moving process from email and the water cooler to E2.0 platforms, or flexibility achieved by moving them from structured but hard to manage custom systems, this outline offers a clear sense for why a social platform is not only more ethical, its more effective because its observable and encourages team participation.

PLM Gets Social, Untangles Ball of Confusion

Stan Przybylinski - @smprezbo - of CIM Data advised an audience at Social PLM 2012 on inevitable social side of product lifecycle management. In the talk (video on YouTube here), he identifies companies including Traction Software (Minute 9:06) whose platforms are being used by product teams for everything from building requirements, to managing risks and simply discussing product issues.

I particularly liked his slide on "How Things Actually Get Done - Can You Say Ball of Confusion?"

The essence of this is that traditional PLM offerings capture some but not all work in progress and don't support the communication loops around project communication or problem solving. Social platforms are filling the gap, and in many cases are actually supporting the whole PLM cycle.

TeamPage Action Tracking can help firms manage informal tasks, track issues or risks, and manage entire projects. TeamPage is also used to manage documentation or work-in-progress and discuss anything that's happening.

25 Oct 2012 | ZDNET Japan on the TeamPage Cloud

A column in ZDNet Japan covered the release by Applied Knowledge Co, Ltd, Yokohama of the TeamPage Cloud in Japan. They wrote "The greatest advantage of TeamPage is that it provides the virtual space to aggregate any information concerning the business and progress in the work space." The column discusses how companies in Japan can take advantage of collaboration tools like TeamPage to produce business value. Japanese companies can get started with Cloud and Download options as of the first of October 2012.

E-Mail: an On-Ramp for Enterprise Social Media

Bill Ives, @billives, points to Nathan Eddy's eWeek column titled Businesses Still Reliant on Email as Social Media Use Grows. The column reminds us that Email is still the dominant go-to application of choice and that's not changing any time soon. Rather than run away from email habits, social software in the enterprise has to embrace it. Back in 2004, I gave a presentation at the INBOX conference advocating for the use of Email as an on-ramp for collaboration and an off-ramp for notification.

Dennis McDonald, @ddmcd, in a comment, concurred in a comment and pointed to his post on Social Media Engagement Tips where he said "Email operates as an extended user interface for many applications."

In TeamPage, we've steadily enhanced support for email as an extended user interface with hooks for Publishing from email including the ability to post new articles, status posts, and tasks. You can also setup notifications on any kind of addition or change. Changes can include edits, tag changes, and assignee changes (for tasks). There's also iCal links to permission filtered server, space, project and personal calendars. You can also reply to comment on notifications, so that you don't have to shift your user experience from your email client or smart phone when a notification needing your immediate response is needed.

TeamPage SAAS / Cloud Hosting Helps Bring Customers Closer, Improves Support

As we've put more attention to our cloud hosting (see Traction Software and Traction Software Japan) with free trials and an increasing hosted customer base, I'm seeing first hand how the customer relationship can become much closer, more interactive and more informed. In the last 24 hours, I was able to quickly help:

- a Global Logistics customer find a set of attachments which were removed when a page was edited 8 days ago.

- an IT / Management consulting customer determine the best way to setup a subcommittee dashboard where they can track issues, manage tasks, conduct discussion and share meeting agendas / outcomes.

This was possible to do asynchronously and quickly around our busy schedules because of a mutual bond of trust (so they allow me into their systems) and because their software is not buried behind a firewall.

Most customers still deploy software behind their firewall for a variety of good reasons. In those cases, we use web conferencing and issue tracking in TeamPage customer support spaces. This still works great, but I'm definitely seeing many cases where the cloud option opens up new opportunities for better support and better value for TeamPage software.

Carving a Path to Productive Knowledge Management: How?

I gave the following presentation at the first ever meeting of the Boston Chapter of the Knowledge Management Association today. As this was a first meeting, I thought I'd raise the issue that "managing knowledge" is about as daunting a task as "herding cats."

After we pick apart components of knowledge and understanding how context is critical to understanding it, I offered a two step process to bring an organization to towards a KM and collaboration strategy that starts with asking How? and relies on Emergineering to work knowledge management and context into daily social processes on platforms like TeamPage.

JSB on Capturing Context not Just Content

In John Seeley Brown's KMWorld Keynote (live streamed 17 Oct 2012 at kmworld.com), he makes an important point about how knowledge has no boundaries. @johnseelybrown #KM12

He goes on to say that the way to manage knowledge in today's age is about capturing context along with content. That's the driving point around Traction TeamPage: Connected Work. It's the reason to build wiki style knowledge bases, integrated with blogs, discussion and tasking.

He goes on to talk about the futility of building profiles and managing inventories of skills by bringing up a case at SAP where the average time to ask and get an answer to a question is 17 minutes. He highlights another case at MITRE where social bookmarking exposes the knowledge and interest areas of each of the employees, while they work.

That's why we built the Social Enterprise Web module, to make social bookmarking easy and to enable discussion and tagging right into the context of enterprise systems.

In JSB's words - this helps meet a goal he states as the need "to build social and intellectual capital" by capturing the output of emergent processes.

He calls sharing in this way as intimate legitimate peripheral participation. PIt's a way to be intimate within working groups, but allow for social listening at scale.

Another terrific example he raises is how to cope when an ERP calls out an exception condition. A social process has to take over.

Employees have to raise, discuss and resolve the issue. Exception handling is a key issue brought up by his work at Deloitte. A system process issue becomes a social process issue to be handled and resolved. Knowledge about the decision is brought together, from content, context and active problem solving.

That's connected work, and why it matters. That's why connecting context with content is relevant and why we could "inherently want to share."

Ada Lovelace Day | Sunita Williams, Astronaut and Captain U.S. Navy

Ada Lovelace Day celebrates the contributions of women in science and technology. This year I've chosen to write about Suni Williams, NASA Astronaut and US Navy Captain currently commanding Expedition 33 on the International Space Station. I hope young women reading about Ada Lovelace Day now are encouraged by her example to pursue their dreams where ever they may lead - here on Earth or as the first Earthling to set foot on Mars.

Captain Williams graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1987 with a B.S. Degree in physical science and was designated a US Naval Aviator in 1989. She served as a helicopter combat support officer and officer in charge of a H-46 detachment for Hurricane Andrew Relief Operations before being selected for NASA's Astronaut Training program in 1998. She served as crew for on International Space Station Expedition 14, setting new records for female astronauts in space (195 days) and spacewalk EVAs.

On July 14 2012 Captain Williams launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome to join ISS Expedition 32 as Flight Engineer and Expedition 33 as Commander. On Aug 6, 2012 she and Flight Engineer Aki Hoshide completed a pair of spacewalks totaling more than fourteen hours to install a balky Main Bus Switching Unit, bringing her total EVA time for six spacewalks to over 44 hours. She is a member of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots and the Society of Flight Test Engineers. Read Captain Williams' Why Did I Become an Astronaut interview for her personal story. Follow @Astro_Suni on Twitter.

Ada icon by Sidney Padua: I strongly recommend that you download the thrilling adventures of Babbage & Lovelace for your iPad (free), and enjoy more of their adventures on author Sydney Padua's 2D Goggles Web page.

Previous years

Ada Lovelace Day | Betts Wald, US Naval Research Lab 2011

Ada Lovelace Day | Fran Allen, IBM Fellow and A.M. Turing Award Winner 2010

Ada Lovelace Day | Professor Lee S. Sproull, Stern School, NYU 2009

1 Oct 2012 | Applied Knowledge Company Ltd Brings Cloud-hosted TeamPage to Japan

Traction Software partner Applied Knowledge Co, Ltd of Yokohama Japan today announced availability of cloud hosted TeamPage for the Japanese market. AKJ President Masayuki Kojima said: "TeamPage provides a new communication infrastructure for projects and multi-team organizations within your company - now available as a cloud service." TeamPage cloud pricing starts at 7,908 yen per month for ten spaces and twenty-five named accounts, see www.TractionSoftware.jp for price, ordering, and product details. TeamPage cloud options include Attivio Advanced Search and Social Enterprise Web. Traction Software offers cloud hosted TeamPage to customers outside the Japanese market, see TeamPage Pricing and Licenses.

www.TractionSoftware.jp

English translation of AKJ Press Release (by Google Translate)

See also Applied Knowledge Co Ltd - Bringing Traction TeamPage 5.1 to Japan

Creating GWT Date / Time Pickers That Work in Any Time Zone

We're working on new features for the next release of TeamPage that allow people to create events on a calendar. For the edit event dialog, we needed date and time pickers that allow people across different time zones to edit the dates and times of events. We ended up creating new GWT controls and adding them to our open source gwt-traction library .

Edit Event Dialog

It seems easy enough to implement using our own secret sauce of HTML/XML/SDL, some GWT, and a bit of CSS to make it look nice. I had almost everything working in an hour or so. Most of the fields use widgets provided by GWT or controls we've already written ourselves. I saved the Start Date and End Date fields for last.

I've used a bunch of different calendar applications and looked around the web for inspiration. Could there be a time control that I could just use? I found a lot of people with similar questions and a few decent solutions. I found this question on Stack Overflow. Eventually I decided that I was on my own. Not a big deal. I've written widgets before and we like to share them with the GWT community, so everyone wins.