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.
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.
- 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.
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 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.
- 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.
It's designed to be flexible.
I think this might be because of the difference of the educations in the U.
How to customize
Okay.
Hiding the unnecessary parts
First of all, I had to hide unnecessary tabs and buttons as much as possible.
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.
.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.
The "Invite" menu shows up only when a user logs in to TeamPage with a user account with the "Invite" permission.
Tabs
The tabs in the header bar is a frequently-used navigation In TeamPage.
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.
Sections
I disabled the sections in [Server Settings] > [Front page] configuration page.
Coloring the notification badge
The notification badge tells you the number of your notifications.
.
It was also easy to color the badge red.
.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.
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.
However, it turned out that there was a problem.
The "Members' Page" means "the dashboard page in the client's private space".
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/
<!--- 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).
After customization
Ta-da! Finally, the top page customizations are done.
The IT Support company liked the simplified face of the top page.
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.
If you are interested in customizing TeamPage, please feel free to contact us.
Related articles
Working Across Boundaries .
The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style .
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.
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.
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.
The ISO 9001:2015 specification includes new requirements for risk-based thinking as well as an improvement program.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Other highlights
New section editor support for choosing a custom sliding time slice "Last [N] [Days | Weeks | Months | Quarters | Years]".
- 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
Related
Question and Answer Form Set plug-in Configuring the and using new Q&A 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.
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.
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.
FullCalendar examples
Related
FullCalendar plug-in Configuring the and using new FullCalendar 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.
Nov 2017 | TeamPage 6.2 Major Release
TeamPage 6.
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.
TeamPage Real-Time Daily Report 日報 (Japan can include tasks, scheduled events, meeting notes, photos, and Customer contact notes using an extensible CRM form on desktop or mobile devices.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
The Standard Meeting Plug-in leverages the capability of TeamPage for task management and contextualizing information.
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.
- The administrative information that identifies the standard meeting e.
g. meeting name, location, attendees, etc. - The Meeting profile that describes the 4 P's (Purpose, Players, Preparation and Plan - the agenda)
- General Information or Detailed minutes
- Decisions made during the meeting
- 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.
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.
A standard meetings section is configured In MBU spaces (e.
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.
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.
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.
All impi! solutions are built on TeamPage on a wiki space and are standard documents.
Several templates are available for improvement projects (e.
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.
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.
For example, Traction Software's Japanese Business office launched a dedicated DailyReports.biz site and solution for the Japanese Daily Report 日報 practice.
Daily Reports can include tasks, scheduled events, meeting notes, photos, and Customer contact notes using an extensible CRM form on desktop or mobile devices.
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).
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.
• 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.
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
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.
Daily Reports can include tasks, scheduled events, meeting notes, photos, and Customer contact notes using an extensible CRM form on desktop or mobile devices.
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).
Traction Software doesn't currently market a dedicated Daily Report solution in other countries.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A common view of organisational structures is to look at discipline and creativity as the two ends of the same structural continuum.
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.
Back in 2005, the author became a champion for the implementation of a continuous improvement programme.
Defending with the shield; attacking with the spear.
The evolution from this picture to the Core Cycle happened over the years.
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.
And by the way, why an "!" at the end of impi! ?
Because the impi is powerful, compelling and exciting.
Related
Introducing impi! - Pierre Bienvenüe - Concepts impi! uses to build business management systems.
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.
Juggling Plates
First of all, work is not all done in one place.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We're close to this basic interoperability using nothing more than a web browser, web standards, and web addressable services.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I believe what's needed is a fabric for actionable work that lives over traditional cloud platforms and services.
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.
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.
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.
Related
From The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style
".
The upshot of the latter data structure is having all the information we need when we need it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Enterprise 2.
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.
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.
"All impi! solutions are built on TeamPage on a wiki space and are standard documents.
"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.
Pierre Bienvenüe is founder of impi Business Improvement Solutions Pty, a South African business improvement firm and TeamPage solution partner since 2012.
Solutions application ⇒ ISO 9001:2015 reference
Sub-clause | Solution | Application by the solution |
4. |
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4. |
Managing Long Range Planning |
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4. |
Managing Long Range Planning |
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4. |
Managing Long Range Planning |
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4. |
Management of Improvement Projects |
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5. |
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5. |
Managing Long Range Planning |
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5. |
Managing Long Range Planning |
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5. |
Managing Long Range Planning |
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6. |
||
6. |
Managing Long Range Planning |
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6. |
Managing Long Range Planning |
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6. |
Establish and Run Mini Business Units |
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6. |
Management of Improvement Projects |
|
7. |
||
7. |
Management of Improvement Projects |
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7. |
Establish and Run Mini Business Units |
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7. |
Management of Improvement Projects |
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7. |
Managing Long Range Planning |
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7. |
Management of Improvement Projects |
|
9. |
||
9. |
Managing Long Range Planning |
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10. |
||
10. |
Establish and Run Mini Business Units |
|
10. |
Management of Improvement Projects |
|
10. |
Managing Long Range Planning |
|
10. |
Management of Improvement Projects |
|
ISO 9001:2015 reference ⇒ solutions application
ISO Clause | Sub-clause | Application by the solution |
Goal Alignment - Managing Long Range Planning |
||
Context of the Organisation |
4. |
|
Context of the Organisation |
4. |
|
Context of the Organisation |
4. |
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Leadership |
5. |
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Leadership |
5. |
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Leadership |
5. |
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Planning |
6. |
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Planning |
6. |
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Support |
7. |
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Support |
7. |
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Performance Evaluation |
9. |
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Improvement |
10. |
|
Goal Alignment - Establish and Run Mini Business Units: SOP | ||
Planning |
6. |
|
Support |
7. |
|
Improvement |
10. |
|
Management of Improvement Projects | ||
Context of the Organisation |
4. |
|
Planning |
6. |
|
Support |
7. |
|
Support |
7. |
|
Improvement |
10. |
|
Improvement |
10. |
|
Related
Introducing impi! - Pierre Bienvenüe - Concepts impi! uses to build business management systems.
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 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.
Additionally, for a few years now we have experienced the convergence of Quality Assurance and Continuous Improvement.
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.
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).
1.
The question here is how to ensure that improvement results in standardisation and standardisation in sustainability.
Another tension exists between the daily operation (immediate) and its systemic improvement (essential).
My response to the two challenges is:
- 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; - 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.
- 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.
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.
Everyone with a computer runs an improvement project (initially) related to their processes.
Then implementation of any system is pushed through that improvement process.
3.
We create spaces for the systemic, strategic and selected operational mini-business units.
4.
Sharing of knowledge is woven into the BMS.
- 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. - 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.
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.
Live video Christopher Nuzum: Tripping up Memory Lane Hyperkult XXV
Adobe Flash required for desktop Chrome or Internet Explorer 10 and earlier.
More
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.
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.
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.
A Simple, Useful Start
We've often thought about what we wanted in a mobile TeamPage app.
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.
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.
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.
Finally, you can use the Share Sheet to share a post's URL with other iOS apps.
That's It
For starters, anyway.
What's Next?
We welcome your feedback, ideas, and, inevitably, bug reports.
Depending on how you use TeamPage, you'll probably have a different opinion about what should come next.
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.
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.
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 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.
• 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.
• 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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
See Takashi's Daily Report Form post for screenshots and examples.
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 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.
• 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.
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.
The Quality Management module also adds new Feedback Report, Non-Conformance, and CAPA forms to TeamPage.
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 interactive Tracking table for each subtab lists the title and selected properties for items of that type.
Click the Add or Update buttons to create or edit the corresponding form type.
Every organization will want to use its own values for pull down choices like Initiator type, Location and other fields.
The Quality Management module is an extra cost option that is now shipping.
Signature Requirements
TeamPage now has a separate module that supports managing signature requirements.
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.
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/
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.
Improved Password Management
When requirements are in effect for passwords for user accounts managed in TeamPage (e.
Developer SDK
Improved TeamPage GWT, SDK, SDL capabilities for creating and editing extended entry types.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.db.
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.
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.
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/
Traction: With a fairly loyal customer base, Traction continues to punch above its weight.
See Kashyap's blog post for other sneak peaks.
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.
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.
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!
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.
".
DATHON, the Tamarian captain: Rai and Jiri at Lungha.
(no response from Enterprise, looks at First Officer in frustration)
(slowly, deliberately) Rai and Jiri.
In the Star Trek universe, a “universal translator” automatically interprets between any alien language instantly and fluently.
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.
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.
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.
And here's what Enterprise 2.
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.
Oct 2015 | Personal Worklists, Quick Forms
TeamPage Fall 2015 Release introduces Personal Worklists: Track and share what you plan to work on.
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.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.
Keystroke | Action |
e | Edit the selected task |
a | Assign the selected task |
c | Close the selected task |
Backspace or Delete | Delete the selected task |
W | Add the selected item to, or remove it from, someone's worklist |
Other Release Highlights
List Separators
Task lists and worklists now support separators, which can be used to organize the list using outline-level headings.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Traction Software folk may make occasional blog posts referencing the Traction History project on this blog or on Twitter.
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.
Teampage extends the concept of an activity stream or channel to include:
- Editable entries with a full audit trail, including wiki history
- An extensible family of entry types (task, status, .
. . ) and relationships (comment, . . . ) - Dashboard and other views that collect, organize, and show entries in context
- 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.
"Somewhere around your 30th responses to a response to a response in Notes, you start to wonder where all this group discussion leads.
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 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.
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.
Email and Teampage has an interesting history.
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.
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.
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.
More
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.
Intertwingled Work - Working and scaling like the Web.
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.
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 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. - 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.
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.
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.
Live Task Lists
TeamPage task lists now support drag and drop ordering.
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.
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.
Related
May 2015 | TeamPage Bookmarks, interactive filters, and Japanese search improvement Focus on what matters to you
March 2015 | TeamPage 6.
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.
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.
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.
I hope you'll enjoy.
Update: See the University of Lüneburg's video of this talk.
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.
Takashi often works with customers who depend on email for external and internal communication.
It's simple to email content into Teampage.
People can receive an email notifications when an article they are interested in is posted to Teampage.
When you receive an email notification, you can reply to the email to automatically add a comment to the threaded discussion.
But too many email notifications can be overwhelming.
You can use email notifications for your highest priority interests, and use the email digest to catch up on everything else.
Takashi concludes (in Google translation): "I think you have done already the spinach by e-mail.
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.
"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.
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.
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).
I’m part of the Stone Age cohort.
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.
“Offering teaching and research assistant opportunities to undergrads,” he says, “was even more unusual, indeed was viewed with everything from skepticism to outright hostility.
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.
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.
“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.
Few people appreciate it more than Ed Lazowska ‘72, who will lead the first (“Stone Age”) panel for Celebrate With Andy.
To provide feedback for the course, students wrote detailed, multi-page evaluations, something that was almost unheard of in 1965.
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.
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.
Originally something made up as they went along, the UTA program matured over a period of decades.
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.
AvD writes: You might mention that the topic wasn’t just hypertext per se, but the use of hypertext for non-linear narratives, esp.
My Part Wor Ks
Brown Computer Science circa 1969.
The story as I recall: Most people chose an individual final project for AM 101/
A grader did an in person review with a two person team, noting a problem.
It became a team programming mantra.
The first part was made into a button, with Wor ks spelling.
More
Related
Andries van Dam - Wikipedia page
Celebrate With Andy: 50 Years Of CS At Brown - May 2015.
Why is professor Andy Van Dam (Andy) so cool? - Quora, Jan 2015.
Pastepost - One more AvD story.
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.
Hypertext Editing System - Wikipedia page.
May 2015 | TeamPage Bookmarks, interactive filters, and Japanese search improvement
TeamPage Summer 2015 Release introduces a new Bookmarks sidebar and interactive filtering.
Bookmarks
Now you can bookmark TeamPage views and return to them later.
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.
Japanese Search
TeamPage now comes bundled with the kuromoji Japanese morphological analyzer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Burn-up Charts Track Progress
Project and Milestone dashboards now include a Burn-up Chart.
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.
TeamPage 6.
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.
Other Release Highlights
New Task Summary - Shown in sidebar of Project and Milestone dashboards.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Updated internationalization, bug fixes, performance, and other improvements.
Related
July 2014 | TeamPage Notifications Introducing inline notifications
June 2014 | Traction® TeamPage 6.
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.
Why did it take so long? I can think of a few reasons.
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.
What do you think? Is Enterprise 2.
Andrew – As we’ve discussed in the past, I don’t believe there’s a specific ‘Are we there yet?’ for Enterprise 2.
The lessons I learned from your excellent book and research are still relevant today.
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.
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.
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.
cheers,
Greg
Related
Enterprise 2.
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.
Ada Lovelace Day | Emmy Noether, Mathematician
Ada Lovelace Day celebrates the contributions of women in science and technology, follow @FindingAda for news and events.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
In all events, bringing her to Göttingen turned out to be an incredibly good idea.
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.
Update See Marie Curie [ and Emmy Noether ] cartoon by xkcd "You don't become great by trying to be great.
Ada icon by Sidney Padua From the Thrilling Adventures of Babbage & Lovelace for your iPad (free).
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.
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.
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.
It’s easy to see how much sense this makes compared to the current client-server model.
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.
“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.
“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.
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.
In my option, one of the technically sweetest characteristics of NCN is its relationship to current TCP/
Like IP, NDN is a “universal overlay”: NDN can run over anything, including IP, and anything can run over NDN, including IP.
Communication in NDN is driven by the receiving end, i.
The router stores in a Pending Interest Table (PIT) all the Interests waiting for returning Data packets.
Names
NDN design assumes hierarchically structured names, e.
Name conventions are specific to applications but opaque to the network, i.
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.
Much of this is QED Marketing - I told you how it works, not what it means for you.
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.
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.
3) NDN might offer an appropriate secure, flexible framework for connecting people to content at work.
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/
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.
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.
A New Way to Look at Networking - Van Jacobson's Aug 2006 Google Tech talk on TCP and Content Centric Networking (CCN).
Reinventing the Web II (Aug 2014) The Web won vs "better" models by turning permanence into a decentralized economic decision.
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.
Thought Vectors - Ted Nelson: Art not Technology (Jul 2014) Ted Nelson should be smiling - but I won't hazard a guess.
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.
Related
Alcoa Tackles IT Projects and Compliance
Aug 2014 | Providence Business News - Social tools being adapted for Web-based QC tool
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).
"The tide of available information continues to rise.
Emerging design approaches help you find ways to make the most of your opportunities for new types of interactions and engagement with Information Objects.
- Exploration, serendipity, use: Rich, relevant design requires an intimate understanding of information and the way people interact with it.
- Scalability, persistence, authority: Rich, relevant design also takes the long view.
Your institution becomes a gateway to an ecosystem of artistic imagery, scholarly insights, history, perspectives, and related objects.
Related
Dark Matter by Michael Peter Edson 19 May 2014.
Thought Vectors - Vannevar Bush and Dark Matter (2014) Inspired by Michael Edson's essay.
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.
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.
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.
The new Notifications menu makes it simple to skim and keep a summary of activity you decide to watch.
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.
Improved Rich Text Editing for iOS devices - Rich text editing using the updated and improved rich text editing support introduced with TeamPage 6.
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.
The Work Graph Model: TeamPage style Understand how TeamPage connects people and their work.
Hello! Greetings from Takashi Okutsu
Hi everyone.
I have worked for Applied Knowledge in Japan as technical support staff, and have a long association with TeamPage since 2007.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To give up on human understanding is to give up hope, what we call in English "a counsel of despair.
I believe the technoid vision does not comprehend what is humanly desired, humanly needed, and humanly possible.
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.
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
More
Related
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.
Living The Dreams: A Conversation With Ted Nelson Published on Jul 5, 2014.
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.
Computer Lib / Dream Machines A brief description of Ted Nelson's 1974 book.
Ladies and gentlemen, the age of prestidigitative presentation and publishing is about to begin.
Theodor H.
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 /
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.
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.

Takashi Okutsu Japanese Business Office
Takashi has been a TeamPage wizard since 2007, and now directs Traction Software's Japanese Business Office.
June 2014 | Traction® TeamPage 6.0
Traction Software is proud to announce Traction TeamPage 6.
Traction TeamPage 6.0 Feature Highlights
Updated Styles for the Proteus Skin - Cleaner, crisper, less cluttered appearance.
New Forms - TeamPage's Web based forms for creating and editing articles, tasks, and other TeamPage objects use a new forms framework.
Updated and Improved Rich Text Editing - TeamPage uses the TinyMCE open source rich text editor, donating contributions back to the main project.
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.
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.
Security Improvements - TeamPage 6.
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® TeamPage 5.
TeamPage Fall 2011 release: Traction TeamPage Social Enterprise Web and Attivio Plus options.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
Doug Engelbart Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.
This week's Thought Vectors in Concept Space assignment is a blog post based on a nugget from the works of Doug Engelbart.
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.
Doug's vision was also an engineering vision, designing and testing new human/
More
Related
Doug Engelbart | 85th Birthday Jan 30, 2010 - Blog post celebrating Doug Engelbart's 85th birthday, includes quotes and links to resources.
DougEngelbart.
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.
Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. by Douglas C.
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.
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.
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.
2) Search engines spanned the simple Web.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know who has suggested this before; it seems obvious, and is a straw man not a solution.
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.
Reinventing the Web (2009) Ted Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee and the evolution of the Web.
The Internet's Original Sin by Ethan Zuckerman, The Atlantic, Aug 14, 2014.
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.
Dark Matter: The dark matter of the Internet is open, social, peer-to-peer and read/
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.
And Victor's followup post "Whenever the ephemerality of the web is mentioned, two opposing responses tend to surface.
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.
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.
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.
Edson's essay begins "The dark matter of the Internet is open, social, peer-to-peer and read/
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.
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/
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.
The medium: Museums have long had lectures, journals, and newsletters.
It is evident from watching 30 seconds of any of their videos that they are nerds, and they proudly describe themselves as such.
The mission: A little less than a year before the end of World War II, President Franklin D.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
And the museum will also be, of course, the single largest beneficiary of outsider improvements to the API.
More
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/
Doug Engelbart | 85th Birthday Jan 30, 2010 - Blog post celebrating Doug Engelbart's 85th birthday, includes quotes and links to resources.
Doug Engelbart: .
Alan Kay: You said that, right?
Doug Engelbart: I must have, its so good.
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.
Here’s why.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Although commonly known as a “computer company,” IBM is really a software and services company, focused on developing and supporting applications for customers.
For IBM’s customers, the MobileFirst endeavor represents just such an opportunity.
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.
Update 23 Aug 2014
Apple HealthKit and VRM.
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.
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.
Update 18 Sep 2014
We're Building Privacy Into Everything You Use Every Day Apple on privacy.
A message from Tim Cook about Apple’s commitment to your privacy Quotes:
At Apple, your trust means everything to us.
Security and privacy are fundamental to the design of all our hardware, software, and services, including iCloud and new services like Apple Pay.
A few years ago, users of Internet services began to realize that when an online service is free, you’re not the customer.
Our business model is very straightforward: We sell great products.
One very small part of our business does serve advertisers, and that’s iAd.
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.
"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/
"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 Work Graph Model: TeamPage style .
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.

David Shepperton Senior Software Engineer
A long-time programmer, Dave graduated from Cornell University in 2001 with a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science.

Roger Fujii Senior Software Engineer
Roger has worked as a Software Engineer for Media Cybernetics and as an independent designer and developer for major graphics and entertainment companies.

Jordan Frank Vice President Sales
Besides sales and business development activities, Jordan speaks at industry conferences and engages in customer consulting - See Emergineering!.

Andy Keller Principal Engineer
Andy has been a key member of the Traction team since 1998.

Chris Nuzum CTO & Co-Founder
Chris co-founded Traction Software after being inspired by a long walk and talk at the 50th anniversary celebration of As We May Think with Doug Englebart, who encouraged Chris to build a company around Chris' vision of a web-based collaborative hypertext journaling system for high-performance teams.
Chris has Master of Science (1993) and Bachelor of Arts (1992) degrees in Computer Science, both from Brown University.

Greg Lloyd President & Co-Founder
Greg has over 30 years experience as architect and engineer for publishing, hypertext, simulation, and real-time operating system projects at the Naval Research Laboratory, Mentor Graphics, and Electronic Book Technologies (EBT), Inc.
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.
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.
"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.
See TeamPage Solutions: Quality Management
and TeamPage Solutions: Project Management
Related
Alcoa Fastening Systems: Forrester Groundswell Award Nomination
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.
These strategies are vital when you seek improvement opportunities with social process engineering.
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.
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.
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).
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 /
Ted Nelson's original 1974 edition of Computer Lib /
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).
Read a fine essay and authorized sample from Computer Lib /
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.
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.
![]() |
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.
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.
Prior to joining Google, Marissa worked at the UBS research lab in Zurich, Switzerland and at SRI International in Menlo Park, California.
"Companies with the best talent win.
Ada icon by Sidney Padua Download the Thrilling Adventures of Babbage & Lovelace for your iPad (free).
Previous years
Ada Lovelace Day | Sunita Williams, Astronaut and Captain U.
Ada Lovelace Day | Betts Wald, US Naval Research Lab 2011
Ada Lovelace Day | Fran Allen, IBM Fellow and A.
Ada Lovelace Day | Professor Lee S.
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.
Work graph defined
".
The upshot of the latter data structure is having all the information we need when we need it.
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.
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.
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.
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 shift your focus whenever you want.
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.
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.
There's one TeamPage work graph connecting all internal, external, public and private content.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Intertwingled Work Observable work can (and should) crossing silos and systems.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 company is ISO/
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.
We also use TeamPage for work instructions read/
Earlier the same day the auditor came to see us we received a customer complaint.
The auditor picked-up on this immediately when he arrived.
- 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.
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
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.
“Someone once called me ‘just a dreamer’.
Press and public valediction
DOUGLAS C.
In Memoriam: Douglas Engelbart, Maestro of the Mouse and So Much More Harry McCracken, Time, 3 July 2013.
Computing pioneer and GUI inventor Doug Engelbart dies at 88 Dylan Tweeny, VentureBeat.
Chris Nuzum's fine valediction for Doug: "RIP Doug Engelbart, and thank you.
Douglas Engelbart's Unfinished Revolution Howard Rheingold, MIT Technology Review 23 July 2013.
Engelbart's First, Second and Third Order Problems.
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.
"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.
Doug Engelbart Resources
DougEngelbart.
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.
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.
Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. by Douglas C.
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.
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.
Traction Software Blog posts
Tricycles vs.
Traction Roots - Doug Engelbart Elements of Doug's work that directly inspired Traction TeamPage, what we do, and how we work.
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.
Enterprise 2.
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).
Happy Birthday Doug Engelbart! Video highlights from Doug's talk and panels at the 50th Anniversary of As We May Think symposium, Oct 1995.
Decagon Devices: Plans, Products, Projects, Procedures and ISO 9001 Quality Management
Decagon Devices (Decagon.
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.
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.
- 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.
Product Management
Each Decagon product has a space in TeamPage.
Product development goes beyond basic tasking to include capturing discussion and key actions throughout a product's lifetime.
Project Management
Company-wide projects are also managed in TeamPage.
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.
The Decagon-wide change management space is called CAPA.
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.
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.
Training procedures are also managed in TeamPage.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pharma and Biotech Risk Management
Risks are the leading cause of costly delays in the process of bringing a biotech product to market.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One Traction TeamPage customer matches the consulting firm /
Another Traction TeamPage customer provides services to customers worldwide, with over 5,000 employees operating in over 150 locations and 75 countries.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
"Later is this document, we discuss the differences between people-centric platforms vs document centric platforms.
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.
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.
Document Centric
"Document-centric offerings are based on collaboration, content or data sharing, or presenting content (documents, files, presentations).
Key Document-centric subcategories: Group Collaboration Workspaces, Project Management Systems, Electronic Calendar and Time Management; Online Proofing & Editing; Mind-mapping and Diagramming; Conferencing.
People Centric
"People-centric solutions are focused on human interactions and are designed to make these interactions more productive.
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.
For more information, please contact the author:
Russell Crafton, Partner
rcrafton@redcapgroup
Redwood Capital
885 Third Avenue, 25th Floor
New York, NY 10022
redcapgroup.
Related
May 2013 | Getting Work Done with Social Task Management
7 Oct 2011 | Jacob Morgan - Emergent Collaboration Vendor Review: Traction Software
Blog1883: Laser focused E2.
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.
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.
E2 Boston conference is at the Boston Marriott Copley Place in downtown Boston, 17-19 June 2013.
For Traction E2 Boston updates, follow @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.
Question Area: Implementation of new social technology platforms
When stepping into E2.
I think the sweet spot occurs when a particular group's collaboration can benefit an entire organization.
Question Area: Adoption of new social technology (by individual users)
Jeff asks what tells you when you've hit a tipping point.
Motivating adoption is always tricky, no matter how good the tool.
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.
Question Area: Formal and informal community management
We all wish communities would manage themselves.
One of my earliest customers was a pharmaceutical division of a Fortune 100.
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.
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.
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.
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 Alcoa Fastening Systems, a Deloitte study highlights a 62% reduction in time spent on compliance activities.
Question Area: Knowledge sharing to learn as well as to perform
I think the term knowledge development hits the mark closer than knowledge sharing.
Contextual Computing At Work
In Co.
Here’s the rub: Our senses aren’t attuned to modern life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Related
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.
Traction Software is a track sponsor this year for the Social and Collaboration Track.
Please visit the E2 Social and Collaboration Track site to learn more and register for this upcoming event.
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.
This requirement for intranet interactivity and confidentiality led Traction Software to offer TeamPage in in both cloud hosted and easily deployed on-premise forms.
To learn more about the Technavio report, please visit Global Enterprise Social Networking market 2012-2016.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
See also Jordan Frank's Laser focused E2.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Blog data in a TeamPage demo also offers a simple and easy example to explain the importance of thin slicing over long trends.
Now, when we use a date selector control, we can see it tells a very different story in 2012 vs.
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.
This sort of tag cloud view offers a pretty blunt view across a whole server or a particular space at a time.
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.
This brings us to Small Data.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
TeamPage Action Tracking can help firms manage informal tasks, track issues or risks, and manage entire projects.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- a Global Logistics customer find a set of attachments which were removed when a page was edited 8 days ago.
- an IT /
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.
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.
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.
He goes on to say that the way to manage knowledge in today's age is about capturing context along with content.
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.
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.
Another terrific example he raises is how to cope when an ERP calls out an exception condition.
Employees have to raise, discuss and resolve the issue.
That's connected work, and why it matters.
Ada Lovelace Day | Sunita Williams, Astronaut and Captain U.S. Navy
Ada Lovelace Day celebrates the contributions of women in science and technology.
Captain Williams graduated from the U.
On July 14 2012 Captain Williams launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome to join ISS Expedition 32 as Flight Engineer and Expedition 33 as Commander.
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.
Ada Lovelace Day | Professor Lee S.
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.
English translation of AKJ Press Release (by Google Translate)
See also Applied Knowledge Co Ltd - Bringing Traction TeamPage 5.
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.
Edit Event Dialog
It seems easy enough to implement using our own secret sauce of HTML/
I've used a bunch of different calendar applications and looked around the web for inspiration.
I'd need two fields: a date input and a time input that together specify a time, independent of timezone.
UTCDateBox
There's a nice date picker control that is part of GWT called a DateBox.
However, we noticed that it doesn't handle time zones very well, so we created the UTCDateBox.
For example, New Years Day is always Jan 1st even though it's still Dec 31st in the US when people start celebrating it in Japan.
Time however, cannot be specified independent of TimeZone.
Since 2003, TeamPage has allowed users to create and edit articles, comments, files, tasks, etc.
UTCTimeBox
Here's the UTCTimeBox that I decided to build.
Even though we have two separate controls for date and time, we still store a single Long value on the server side as milliseconds since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 GMT.
I spent a while on this until I realized that there just isn't enough information about TimeZones available to JavaScript.
Since we can't properly split a single Long value into date and time parts in the browser, we'll have to do it on the server.
When a user submits the form, the server, which knows the user's time zone, creates the corresponding Date value.
Now we can edit events and the value is properly stored on the server.
UTCDateTimeRangeController
The final piece is creating some interaction between the start and end dates to make it easier to create and maintain proper ranges.
HTML5 date/time inputs for iOS
HTML5 has new inputs for date, time, month, datetime, and more.
As a developer using the UTCDateBox and UTCTimeBox, you don't need to do anything special to use the HTML5 versions in iOS.
1 Sept 2012 | KMWorld names TeamPage A Trend-Setting Product of 2012
KMWorld recognized Traction Software's TeamPage as a 2012 Trend-Setting Product of 2012, citing TeamPage for "action tracking, Twitter-style status, threaded discussion, collaboration, social networking and deep search.
Remembering Neil Armstrong...
"I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer -- born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in the steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace, and propelled by compressible flow.
Armstrong and Scott were scheduled for a brief question and answer session at the Pennsylvania state science museum auditorium in Harrisburg - squeezed between astronaut meet and greet events for the Governor and state legislators a few blocks away.
A state official welcomed Armstrong and Scott, invited them to tell us about the Gemini VII mission, and cautioned that they'd only have a few minutes for questions before they had to move on to the next event.
All hands went up.
The next question went to the pudgy kid with glasses and camera jumping up and down in the tenth row - me.
I got a smile and a nod from Neil.
On Saturday 25 Aug his family posted: "Neil was our loving husband, father, grandfather, brother and friend.
They continue:
“While we mourn the loss of a very good man, we also celebrate his remarkable life and hope that it serves as an example to young people around the world to work hard to make their dreams come true, to be willing to explore and push the limits, and to selflessly serve a cause greater than themselves.
“For those who may ask what they can do to honor Neil, we have a simple request.
I hope this sky isn't cloudy, since I plan to spend some time looking at the moon.
A few links and references on the life and times of Neil Armstrong, including several that aren't so common.
The Engineered Century - Neil Armstrong, National Academy of Engineering, Spring 2000, The Bridge, National Academy of Engineering.
Neil A. Armstrong (1930 - 2012) - From the family of Neil Armstrong
Neil Armstrong | 1930 - 2012: Made 'Giant Leap' as First Man to Step on Moon - John Noble Witford's New York Times obituary, 25 Aug 2012
Gemini VIII Mission Summary - NASA Apollo Lunar Surface Journal
Apollo XI Mission Summary - NASA Apollo Lunar Surface Journal
Lunar Landing Guidance Equations - Part of the source code for the Lunar Module's (LM) Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), for Apollo 11.
Oral History Transcript Neil A.
Catalog of NASA Oral History Collections - NASA Headquarters and Field Centers
Monitoring and Leveraging Social Media Chatter, on the Internet and in the Enterprise
In the Pharma Chatter session at the SLA 2012 (Special Librarians Association) conference, I had the opportunity to talk about gathering and managing intelligence from social media.
On the internet front, I focused on traps to avoid when monitoring and leveraging social media on the internet.
After highlighting a set of use cases where my customers have found success, I outlined one specific case where a team and their limited community of <100 managers and executives have proven their leverage with over 84,000 reads and an average of 35 reads per page posted in a year.
Anti-Social Software
It's common to read about corporate culture as a big barrier to successful adoption and use of social software in business.
The culture of some organizations ranges from ineffectual to poisonous, and it's difficult to turn such organizations around.
The purpose of the manual was to educate people in World War II occupied countries on techniques for simple sabotage, performed by ordinary citizens with no special training or equipment.
Simple Sabotage Field Manual
OSS Field Manual No. 3
17 Jan 1944
17 Jan 1944
1. INTRODUCTION
a.
b.
c.
d.
.
11. General Interference with Organizations and Production
(a) Organizations and Conferences
(1) Insist on doing everything through "channels.
(2) Make "speeches.
(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration.
(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
(5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
(7) Advocate "caution.
(8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision - raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.
(b) Managers and Supervisors
(1) Demand written orders.
(2) "Misunderstand" orders.
(3) Do everything possible to delay the delivery of orders.
(4) Don't order new working materials until your current stocks have been virtually exhausted, so that the slightest delay in filling your order will mean a shutdown.
(5) Order high-quality materials which are hard to get.
(6) In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first.
(7) Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least fiaw.
(8) Make mistakes in routing so that parts and materials will be sent to the wrong place in the plant.
(9) When training new workers, give incomplete or misleading instructions.
(10) To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions.
(11) Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
(12) Multiply paper work in plausible ways.
(13) Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, pay checks, and so on.
(14) Apply all regulations to the last letter.
(c) Office Workers
(1) Make mistakes in quantities of material when you are copying orders.
(2) Prolong correspondence with government bureaus.
(3) Misfile essential documents.
(4) In making carbon copies, make one too few, so that an extra copying job will have to be done.
(5) Tell important callers the boss is busy or talking on another telephone.
(6) Hold up mail until the next collection.
(7) Spread disturbing rumors that sound like inside dope.
(d) Employees
(1) Work slowly.
(2) Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can: when changing the material on which you are working, as you would on a lath or punch, take needless time to do it.
(3) Even it you understand the language, pretend not to understand instructions in a foreign tongue.
(4) Pretend that instructions are hard to understand, and ask to have them repeated more than once.
(5) Do your work poorly and blame it on bad tools, machinery, or equipment.
(6) Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skillful worker.
(7) Snarl up administration in every possible way.
(8) If possible, join or help organize a group for presenting employee problems to the management.
(9) Misroute materials.
(10) Mix good parts with unusable scrap and rejected parts.
12.
(a) Give lengthy and incomprehensible explanations when questioned.
(b) Report imaginary spies or danger to the Gestapo or police.
(c) Act stupid.
(d) Be as irritable and quarrelsome as possible without getting yourself into trouble.
(e) Misunderstand all sorts of regulations concerning such matters as rationing, transportation, traffic regulations.
(f) Complain against ersatz materials.
(g) In public treat axis nationals or quislings coldly.
(h) Stop all conversation when axis nationals or quislings enter a cafe.
(i) Cry and sob hysterically at every occasion, especially when confronted by government clerks.
(j) Boycott all movies, entertainments, concerts, newspapers which are in any way connected with the quisling authorities.
(k) Do not cooperate in salvage schemes.
Strategic Services Field Manual No. 3
17 January 1944
OSS William J.
Declassified 2 April 2008
Download the full manual (.
15-17 Jul 2012 | SLA 2012 Annual Conference and INFO-EXPO
Traction Software's Jordan Frank will be speaking on Pharma Competitive Intelligence at this year's SLA 2012 Annual Conference in Chicago, Noon 16 July (see session summary below - and slides in Monitoring and Leveraging Social Media Chatter, on the Internet and in the Enterprise).
Pharma Chatter: Capturing and Managing Non-traditional Information for Competitive Advantage
Learn about the unique nature of competitive intelligence in the pharmaceuticals industry and hear how info pros are using it to improve their organizations' competitive advantage.
MODERATING:
Craig McHenry, Pfizer Inc.
SPEAKING:
Lisa Orgren, Septagon Research Group
Heather Bjella, Esq.
Jordan Frank, Traction Software
Monday July 16, 2012 12:00pm - 1:30pm @ Convention Center, Room E264
"All of this has led me to believe that something is terribly wrong with e-mail. What’s more, I don’t believe it can be fixed."
"All of this has led me to believe that something is terribly wrong with e-mail.
Nick continues: "Last year, Royal Pingdom, which monitors Internet usage, said that in 2010, 107 trillion e-mails were sent.
Email is OK for incoming introductions and disposible notifications, but when you try to use email for collaboration, multiple To: addresses turn it into something like the stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers A Night at the Opera.
Add the Cc: line and give up all hope! In 2008 Google engineer Kevin Marks referred to email as a "strange legacy idea" for the younger generation.
In 2003 Clay Shirky said: "All enterprises have more knowledge in their employees as a group than any one person, even (especially?) the CEO.
From my 2008 blog post Email isn't dead - It's only sleeping
See Clay Shirky, Social Software: A New Generation of Tools by Clay Shirky, Release 1.
Caroline McCarthy, The future of Web apps will see the death of e-mail, CNet.
Modern social software is now being widely adopted as an alterative to email collaboration, based on a pattern that Doug Engelbart recognized long ago, see Flip Test 1971 | Email versus Journal.
May I suggest Traction TeamPage?
Why links matter - for your business as well as the public Web
Mathew Ingram recently wrote Why links matter: Linking is the lifeblood of the web.
"Links were and are the currency of the collaborative web, that started with blogs and since then has spread to everything from Twitter to Facebook to Tumblr.
Despite the success of Facebook and mobile apps that attempt to maximize value from walled gardens (where your attention is the product being sold), I remain optimistic that the Web and behavior that rewards linking will continue to win.
And I believe that the same open link and search model will win for work and serendipitous discovery in the realm of Enterprise 2.
See Intertwingled Work, my two cents on why links matter in E2.
Why we're here. TeamPage at Enterprise 2.0 Boston 2012
If you're attending E20 Boston 2012, please drop by Traction Software's booth 418 to say hi and learn what Traction TeamPage can do.
TeamPage in the Cloud Jordan and I can answer questions about TeamPage's new Cloud options, starting at less than $2.
You can see TeamPage improvements introduced over the past year, including:
New streamlined Proteus interface makes summary awareness, status, task tracking, and coordinated activity fast and easy.
Unified search in the header makes looking up people, spaces, tasks or projects quick and easy.
Autosave and "finish later" saves your work in progress if you want to take a break - or if you accidentally click away from or close a browser window!
iPad and mobile access Monitor the pulse of your organization, stay informed, and work securely from the beach or mountains with your iPad, iPhone, or Android tablet.
If you're early in line Tuesday or Wednesday, you can also pick up free, signed, pre-release copy of Jacob Morgan's excellent new book The Collaborative Organization.
If you're too late to pick up a free copy, you can still pick up a bookmark as a reminder of what Enterprise 2.
The Future of Work Platforms: Like Jazz
Extending the fabric of work, or How to Be Emergent
20 June 2005 | Supernova | Why Can't a Business Work More Like the Web?
The Collaborative Organization - Free signed copy, Traction Software Booth 418 E2.0 Boston 2012
I've read an advance copy of Jacob Morgan's upcoming book, The Collaborative Organization: A Strategic Guide to Solving Your Internal Business Challenges Using Emerging Social and Collaborative Tools.
Jacob organizes his book into three parts: The Opening, The Middle Game, and The End Game.
Jacob's book is based on his own analysis and research, including interviews, case studies and survey responses from 234 individuals around the world, working for companies ranging from 1,000 to over 100,000 employees, with responsibilities ranging from mid-level to C-level executives.
Each chapter includes analysis, examples and a well-written Summary and Action items section, with actionable advice that you'll turn to often.
It's a handbook you'll have on your desk for the next few years.
- Chapter 2 - The First Step to Recovery is Admitting You have a Problem on business drivers and problems (20 pages)
- Chapter 7 - The Adaptive Emergent Collaboration Framework practical advice on choosing and adapting approaches to match your business goals and culture (27 pages)
- Chapter 8 - Resistance is Futile on barriers to success (13 pages)
- Chapter 12 - Measures of Success, practical advice on measuring soft benefits, hard benefits, and defining business value (19 pages)
Traction Software is the only source for full hardbound copies before the book's official ship date in July 2012! Show up in person at Traction Software's booth 418 during E20 Boston 2012 Showcase Exhibit hours.
Free copies are limited.
Update: See E2.0 Boston 2012 Twitter Pop-Quiz for rules and quiz highlights.
Update: Thanks to the @e2conf staff and everyone who dropped by booth 418 to talk, and pick up a free copy of Jacob's book.
Also, after visiting us at Booth 418, don’t miss Robert Morison (@rfmorison), author of Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results at Talent Analytics Booth 232.
See 19-20 Jun 2012 | Traction Software Enterprise 2.
NHS Part 3: NHS Orkney Board gets TeamPage and £28,000 Annual ROI
The Board of Directors at National Health Service's Orkney hospital use TeamPage and iPads to eliminate paper at board meetings.
The National Health Service in the UK is one of the world's largest employers.
Until recently, Orkney printed significant amounts of paper for their Board of Directors before each board meeting.
They moved to a "paper-light" process by moving the documents to a PDF format and sharing via a TeamPage space.
The Guardian quotes Chairman Scott as indicating: A 'spend to save' initiative was put into play using capital resources to purchase iPads and we removed printers from desks, cleared out our stores of printing material and instilled in board members the need for them to use technology and reject paper use.
Having seen success right off the bat, Chairman Scott talked about his intention to expand their digital efforts in an interview with BBC News: "In my view we need now to spread the initiative down through the organization.
At A Web That Works - Social Tools and Programming at NHS, David Rendall expands on these stories with specifics on why iPads were chosen, where TeamPage plays a role, and other aspects of their network that come together to deliver this solution.
19-20 Jun 2012 | Traction Software Enterprise 2.0 Boston
Traction TeamPage makes it easy for people to communicate, work together, and stay on top of what's happening anywhere in their business, including line of business systems and the public Web.
The Collaborative Organization: A Strategic Guide to Solving Your Internal Business Challenges Using Emerging Social and Collaborative Tools by Jacob Morgan, McGraw Hill, 304 pages, hardback.
Vivek Kundra, Former Chief Information Officer of the USA.
Erik Brynjolfsson Director of MIT Center for Digital Business and co-author, Race Against the Machine and Wired for Innovation of Chair of the MIT Sloan Management Review “Most business leaders understand how critical collaborative tools are to the success of their companies.
For Traction E2.
This year's E2.
See e2conf.
See also Why we're here.
The Collaborative Organization - Free signed copy, Traction Software Booth 418 E2.
Laser focused E2.0, without the risk? Get Traction!
I really like how Kashya Kompella from the Real Story Group offered a great dose of context for his E2.0 Marketplace Analysis Q2 2012: "Slightly modifying what the ancient Greeks said, you cannot dip your finger twice in the same (activity) stream.
In his 4D chart below, Kompella grades market players based on vendor business and product risk.
By way of example, perhaps he grades Newsgator as low vendor and high product risk because they've been around a long time (vendor stability) but their product focus has changed entirely three times (from RSS client to RSS Server to Social layer on SharePoint).
The Vendor and Product risk appears general as the color of the circle also demonstrates an area of risk based on the vendor's focus on the E2.
Traction Software and our product Traction TeamPage show up low and to the left (low product and vendor risk) in a cluster with Microsoft and Oracle.
Of course, none of this matters if the platform isn't any good.
To gauge quality, there are ample analysts who've weighed in on that matter, showing TeamPage has a stable platform upon which we've been able to innovate successfully over the last decade.
- Forbes.com contributor Haydn Shaughnessey says: "Traction, for my money, is the best conceived collaboration suite for companies that have a technical development requirement.
" He cites Traction Software as an example of a business that successfully competes with large companies like IBM by retaining: ".. . close attention to client needs, a personal desire to explore changes in the work environment, and a desire to see those reflected in the platform. " - The 9th Annual MIT Sloan CIO Symposium has announced Traction Software as one of ten finalists for the 2012 Innovation Showcase as its Traction TeamPage product represents a cutting edge B2B solution that combines the strong value and innovation to enterprise IT.
- CTOLabs adds Traction Software to its companies of note list, "firms we believe enterprise technologists should track":
- Jacob Morgan from Chess Media Group says: I’ve seen the Traction product a few times now I have to say that I really like it and not just for small and medium size businesses.
Traction offers an amazing search integration feature which many large vendors can’t even come close to replicating. "
So, if you want a platform that rocks and remains cutting edge in the E2.
23 Apr 2012 | Traction Software Named Finalist for MIT Sloan CIO Symposium 2012 Innovation Showcase
Cambridge, MA – April 23, 2012 – The 9th Annual MIT Sloan CIO Symposium has announced Traction Software as one of ten finalists for the 2012 Innovation Showcase as its Traction TeamPage product represents a cutting edge B2B solution that combines the strong value and innovation to enterprise IT.
"Traction Software is honored to be selected as a finalist.
Traction TeamPage makes it easy for people to communicate, work together, and stay on top of what's happening anywhere in their company, connecting people, business applications, and the Web.
“We are very impressed with these top ten Innovation Showcase finalists, as their technologies demonstrate incredible state of the art thinking to today and tomorrow’s challenges,” said David L.
For a full list of Innovation Showcase finalists visit the Innovation Showcase Overview.
The Innovation Showcase will take place at 6:20pm in the Kresge courtyard tent on Tuesday, May 22, 2012, at MIT, in Cambridge, MA.
About the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium
The MIT Sloan CIO Symposium is the premier global event for CIOs and senior IT executives to become better business leaders.
To stay connected to the community developing around the Symposium, please join The Global CIO & Executive IT Group (An MIT Sloan CIO Group), which can be found on Linkedin.
"Probably the coolest vendor pricing page I've seen for any collaboration vendor" ~ Jacob Morgan
Thanks to Jacob Morgan, Chess Media Group for his Tweet this afternoon while we were chatting on the phone.
We followed Jacob's price comparison model, providing interactive feedback on per user per month pricing as well as an annual roll-up and clear option pricing.
Pricing options includes cloud-hosted Attivio premium search and Social Enterprise Web, choices of workgroup or full TeamPage configurations, flexible pricing based on the number of named accounts, and easy upgrades when you want them.
I'd change Jacob's probably the coolest and say the coolest, no doubt! Thanks Chris! Go to the Buy page and see for yourself.
A Focus on Individual Users
With Dartmouth President Jim Kim's recent nomination to the World Bank, I pulled out my copy of Mountains beyond Mountains to find the Kim quote that I found most inspiring for my day to day work.
From page 294:
"And," he says, "another secret: a reluctance to do scut work is why a lot of my peers don't stick with this kind of work.
" In public health projects in difficult locales, theory often outruns practice. Individual patients get forgotten, and what seems like a small problem gets ignored, until it grows large, like MDR. "If you focus on individual patients," Jim Kim says, "you can't get sloppy. "
Sure, guiding customers on their social software use cases (one of many things I do in a day) seems somewhat insignificant compared to eradicating Tuberculosis in Haiti (one of Jim Kim's missions when founding Partner's in Health with Paul Farmer) though we do have the occasional case such as the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative where software is being used to combat a plant disease which, unabated, would cause a great deal of starvation.
Nonetheless, there is useful wisdom in the focus on the individual patient which, in my case, is the software user, their business need and corresponding use case.
While most folks get up and running perfectly well TeamPage, there are various that could do things better.
Another case was an energy company that tracked issues with Wiki pages because that was the first thing they tried.
All too often, RFPs and their corresponding software requirements roll up a set of user needs into a list of features that you check off to qualify.
You can't just solve a software problem in the abstract any better than you can solve a health problem without seeing the patient, their living conditions and even the political environment in which they live.
Jim Kim did great things for Dartmouth and I wish him luck in getting the position at the World Bank.
7 March 2012 | Forbes - Social Business Is A More Moral Form of Business: Discuss
Forbes.
1 March 2012 | Traction Software Named to KMWorld's 100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management
For the eighth consecutive year, KMWorld recognized Traction Software by naming the company to their KMWorld 100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management.
What's the Point ?
From Nora Ephron speaking at Brown University, President's Lecture series, "Adventures in Screenwriting" April 24, 1997.
We learned the basics of story writing - who, what, when, where - and then learned how to write a lede.
Mr.
He said, "Write the lede.
We turned them in.
"Your lede is, No School Thursday"
At that instant, I thought "What's the point? What a wonderful question!"
Feb 15, 2012 Reading John E.
Happily I had a record of my notes posted in Traction Software's TeamPage server automatically carried forward from pre-release version of TeamPage, and still as easily findable and quotable as my latest post.
"If what you write does not relate to the point, it may be good, but it will likely end up on the cutting room floor.
8 Feb 2012 | CTOLabs - Traction Software: Connected Work
CTOLabs adds Traction Software to its companies of note list, "firms we believe enterprise technologists should track": The future of work:
collaboration, conversation, identity, work product, action tracking and activity streams in context, coupled by permission-aware deep search, spanning systems of record and transactional business systems.
Happy Birthday Doug Engelbart!
Happy Birthday Doug! A perfect gentle knight of technology as well as a pioneer and great inventor.
Update Remembering Doug Engelbart, 30 January 1925 - 2 July 2013
[from archive.
See the Video Archives - Bush Symposium page at the Doug Engelbart Institute website for links to all 11 sessions of this Symposium.
This movie is part of the collection: Doug Engelbart Video Archives
11 Jan 2012 | Forbes - In Social Business, How to Prioritise a Successful Outcome
Forbes.
See related Enterprise 2.
The Future of Work Platforms: Like Jazz
Borlaug Global Rust Initiative Wins 2010 Forrester Groundswell Social Impact Award
and TeamPage Connected Work
21 Dec 2011 | エンタープライズソーシャル+サーチで「知識管理」の課題解決
ITPro Active has published a white paper by Traction Software Partner Applied Knowledge Co, Ltd on Social Enterprise Knowledge Management and Search.
"As a solution to these challenges is to leverage the structure of social networks like Facebook and blogs, and enhanced security and access privileges for enterprises, "enterprise social computing" is effective to introduce.
See Google's English translation of the ITPro article and register to download the white paper (in Japanese).
7 Dec 2011 | Tech Expert Offers Advice to British Company That Plans to Ban E-mail for 80,000 Workers
PRNewswire Dec 7, 2011: Leading unified information access company, Attivio, suggests alternate approach to all-out ban.
Probstein offers prescriptive guidance for businesses facing similar challenges.
Organizations can dramatically reduce e-mail volume by using it where it makes sense, by deploying Traction TeamPage and other advanced Enterprise 2.
"The key to effectively managing e-mail is to retain the right information and enable users to control it as they do any other important corporate resource," explains Probstein.
- Link internal correspondence that relates to external communications from customers and partners;
- Use a Unified information access strategy to identify relevant, messages;
- Secure and index e-mails with other important files, E 2.
0 collaboration tools, intranet pages, and content from CMS or competitors' websites; - Discover e-mail through the normal process of search, running reports, or monitoring dashboards.
Good advice Sid! Read the full Press Release
See also Extending the fabric of work, or How to Be Emergent
Email isn't dead - It's only sleeping
Professional Services
Traction Software professional services including business process consulting, training, TeamPage configuration, interface (skin) design, integration, and custom feature development.
You should be able to download, install and start working with Traction TeamPage in an hour or less.
Expert guidance and support from Traction Software can help you apply best practices we've learned working with customers from startups to Government agencies and the Fortune 500 companies deploying Traction for product management, project management, competitive intelligence, customer focused collaboration, supply chain management, operations logging and other business applications.
Using Traction's extensible platform and toolkit we can quickly bring your own development team up to speed with training and consulting services, or do the work for you.
Please contact our sales team to discuss Traction Software professional services.
Don't take my word for it - Byrne and Koplowitz on SharePoint
At the Enterprise 2.0conference two weeks ago, Tony Byrne (President, the Real Story Group) and Rob Koplowitz (VP and Principal Analyst, Forrester Research) were joined for the SharePoint Analyst Panel.
IT Managers across the globe are deploying SharePoint in hopes that it will form the basis of their collaboration and social strategy, but SharePoint's ability to check off the feature lists (yes, it has a notion of profiles, pages, tagging, discussion, tasking) belies the actual outcome.
Koplowitz said: "it's a lot better portal than it is a social platform.
" (I am not convinced that this implies it's a good portal) Byrne said: "They've built a decent platform for lightweight file-oriented collaboration.
. . But SharePoint only provides two of the 10 or 11 key applications enterprises are looking for" in a social platform. Byrne said: "the dirty little secret of SharePoint is that the vast majority of its usage is for very basic file sharing.
" Koplowitz said: "If you're going to take on this beast--if you're going to take the buffalo down--you'd better be prepared to consume every part of it.
"
Not very promising.
An easy way to handle basic file sharing or even construct a basic portal may be an important part of an information strategy but isn't worth the true cost of SharePoint and doesn't merit the upside down 3 to 1 (by a conservative estimate) services to licensing cost ratio that any company should be ready to swallow if they want to tune and customize SharePoint to do more than what it's good at out of the box (some portal and lightweight file oriented collaboration activities).
If you don't have SharePoint, Koplowitz' fair warning is you better be ready to take the buffalo down.
1) It is OK at short term, small team oriented file collaboration and always will be.
2) You can break down the workspace and content type silo problem and make that locked up content more findable, social and valuable by adding TeamPage to the mix.
Why stop with a social wrapper around or inside SharePoint.
Bottom part of home page
Traction TeamPageTraction TeamPage integrates action tracking, Twitter-style status, threaded discussion, collaboration, and deep search. This connects people, tags, tasks, content in TeamPage with the Web, your intranet, and systems including SharePoint, File servers, Documentum, and SQL Databases. We call this Connected Work. |
Connected Work“Using TeamPage Attivio Search Plus and TeamPage's Social Enterprise Web, external documents, pages and transactions are now able to become social objects seamlessly integrated with Traction TeamPage's action tracking, search, collaboration and communication.” ~ KMWorld: Marrying deep search and collaboration, June 22 2011 |
Don't Just Take Our Word For It |
|
"The paper highlights the experience of one early adopter, Alcoa Fastening Systems... achieving a 61 percent reduction in time required for compliance activities by leveraging [Traction TeamPage] social software tools..." — Deloitte: Social Software for Business Performance - The missing link in social software: Measurable Business improvements Feb 23, 2011
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“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.”
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Traction Software Products
Traction TeamPage is the heart of Traction Software's product family.
TeamPage is great product for collaborative work by people in businesses of every size and industry because TeamPage focuses on the basics: how to help people get work done using technology that's simple to understand, pleasant to use, saves times, reduces frustration, and opens the door to discovery and innovation.
But TeamPage is far from the only place where work gets done.
TeamPage goes beyond other collaboration platforms by including built-in support for Action Tracking, optional Attivio analysis and search for all collaborative and file content in TeamPage, and new Social Enterprise Web and Attivio Plus options that connect TeamPage collaboration and action tracking with work created and stored in file servers, Sharepoint, Documentum, SQL Databases and the Web.
SeeThe Work Graph Model: TeamPage style to understand how TeamPage connects people and their work.
As Jacob Morgan, Chess Media Group writes in his Oct 7, 2011 Traction Software Vendor Review
Traction allows for the creation of employee, customer, and/
or partner facing communities. While search is a powerful component of Traction is but one of many. Traction is a full-feature emergent collaboration platform which allows for group creation, status updates, document management, and anything else you can expect to find in an emergent collaboration vendor.
Key differentiating factors from competition
- Search functionality, Traction is the only vendor I have seen with such a deep search capability.
In fact, search is what binds all of the content and information that is passed through and is placed on Traction. This deep search extends beyond what is just found on Traction and it searches all back-end systems for relevant information. Permissions can be set to limit who sees what type of results. - Deeply integrated action tracking and coordination, the system lets you comment, tag, task, and link within work space boundaries or across boundaries.
This means that if I am in the marketing department reviewing a marketing plan which references product specifications needed from a product developer, that I can literally create a task within the document (at the specific and relevant point) and assign it to someone in another work group, for example someone in the product team. Most vendors have spaces that allow you to create advanced lists which are visualized as tasks or calendars, but these are siloed and not truly integrated. Traction solves that problem by being able to cross workspace boundaries. - Pricing, small and medium size businesses are basically getting a package with enterprise search capabilities at an affordable price.
Jacob Morgan, Chess Media Group
Emergent Collaboration Vendor Review: Traction Software Oct 7, 2011
Deep Search
"Using TeamPage Attivio Search Plus and TeamPage's Social Enterprise Web, external documents, pages and transactions are now able to become social objects seamlessly integrated with Traction TeamPage's action tracking, search, collaboration and communication.
TeamPage Attivio® option adds world-class content analysis, search and content navigation
Attivio’s Active Intelligence Engine™ (AIE) indexes TeamPage content and metadata, performs advanced linguistic and context analysis, delivers permission-aware, relevance-ranked search and content navigation.
All TeamPage content is indexed and analyzed: articles, comments, status, links, relationships, space, tags, actions, authors, profiles, attached documents and shared files - over 370 formats.
TeamPage delivers faceted navigation by keyphrase, tag, space, author, sentiment and other metadata.
TeamPage’s Attivio Plus option fuses TeamPage and External Systems of Record to work like the Web
TeamPage integrates search and discussion.
Tag, task, and share content stored in SharePoint, email in Exchange, Documentum, File servers, SQL Databases, the public Web, private intranets, and other sources.
External sources are incrementally indexed in place and pick up native permissions that TeamPage obeys.
Search SharePoint and TeamPage sources.
TeamPage’s Attivio Plus option fuses TeamPage and External Systems of Record to work like the Web
TeamPage integrates search and discussion.
External sources are incrementally indexed in place and pick up native permissions that TeamPage obeys.
Search SharePoint and TeamPage sources.
Collaboration
[outline teampage features for creation /
Configurable and Extensible
Traction TeamPage provides built-in forms to install, configure and manage the initial setup including permissioned access rules and connection to external email, Active Directory, LDAP, and Jabber services.
TeamPage configuration wizards guide you through initial setup and configuration, as well as initial configuration of new collaboration Spaces you create.
TeamPage Server, Space, and Personal preference configuration
TeamPage configuration forms allow people with Setup permission to configure a wide variety of options and defaults - from CSS interface colors and layout, to default time zone, locale (and language), to Proteus skin configuration options to let you configure the number and order of top-level tabs shown in each TeamPage space.
CSS Stylesheet Customization
TeamPage view layouts, colors, and content can be customized using CSS style sheet overrides that are easy to configure, test and install.
TeamPage SDL and SDK
The Traction Software Developers Kit (SDK) and Skin Definition Language (SDL) make it easy for developers to extend or customize Traction Teampage's appearance, behavior, and connections to other systems beyond what you can do with TeamPage forms and CSS customization.
Traction's Skin Definition Language (SDL) makes it simple to program look and feel extensions.
With these tools it's possible to create custom interfaces, views and forms, Custom Interfaces, Views and Forms as well as special purpose Skins (User Interface).
Traction's SDK can also be used to create new widgets.
Plug-in Architecture
Developers can use Traction's plug-in architecture to add new functions to TeamPage or override and extend the appearance and behavior of standard TeamPage features and interfaces.
Plug-ins makes it simple to fine tune, re-arrange or simplify the appearance and behavior of standard skins as well as add unique features and widgets'.
Plug-in extensions are packaged as self-contained files that are easy to create, share, and install in an extensions directory.
The TeamPage plug-in architecture includes Server Setup web page that makes it easy for server administrators to install and configure options plug-in extensions.
Here's a an image of the page where you upload, delete and manage plug-ins, the Jabber notifier is selected:
When you click Configure, a form pops up allowing the administrator to setup server level properties and default user level properties of the plug-in.
Plug-in's can extend or override Traction's Skin Definition Language for simple UI extensions, or use Traction's Java Software Developer Kit to create new SDL tags, derive from Traction's Java SDK components, or create new authentication, notification and other components using the SDK's run-time extensible interfaces.
Accessories Pricing
TeamPage Feedreader: Adds the capability to read and publish RSS or Atom Feeds from external source for $2,500 per year, or $5,000 for a permanent license.
NTLM2 Single Signon: Adds the capability to use Microsoft's NTLM2 Single Signon Protocol for a one time fee of $795 (Annual or Perpetual license).
TeamPage Attivio Plus Pricing
Attivio Plus uses Attivio's Active Intelligence Engine™ (AIE) to index and analyze content stored in external business systems including file servers, Microsoft SharePoint, Documentum, Lotus Notes - even records in SQL Databases.
A TeamPage Attivio Plus license makes Attivio's advanced capability affordable for small to mid size businesses by offering a la cart packaging and pricing of capabilities, starting at $25,000 per year for one source (for example File server data).
Please contact sales for Attivio Plus options and pricing.
See TeamPage Workgroup or standard TeamPage pricing tables if you want to use Attivio to index and analyze Traction TeamPage content and shared files without using Attivio Plus to extend indexing and analysis beyond TeamPage to external business systems.
Cloud Hosted Pricing
Traction Software offers Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) hosted TeamPage servers, including Amazon backup of Journal data, Traction Software management and installation of TeamPage updates, and hosting for the Attivio Advanced Search option.
Hosted TeamPage service is offered for any Annual Subscription or Perpetual TeamPage license, including Social Enterprise Web and Attivio Search options.
Please contact sales for configuration options and pricing.
Standard TeamPage Pricing
A standard Traction TeamPage configuration includes unlimited TeamPage Spaces.
See TeamPage Workgroup pricing you only need up to ten Spaces to support a smaller number of independent stakeholder or business activities.
Annual subscription pricing for a standard TeamPage configuration starts at $4,375/
For Attivio Plus or Cloud hosted options, please Contact sales.
Social Enterprise Web Discount: Deduct 20% from Social Enterprise Web pricing for purchases by March 31, 2012.
Annual Subscription
TeamPage Annual Subscription |
TeamPage (Unlimited Spaces) |
Social Enterprise Web Add |
Attivio Search Add |
25 Named Accounts | $4,375 | $2,500 | $2,500 |
50 Named Accounts | $6,250 | $2,500 | $2,500 |
100 Named Accounts | $8,750 | $5,000 | $5,000 |
200 Named Accounts | $15,000 | $5,000 | $5,000 |
500 Named Accounts | $27,500 | $10,000 | $10,000 |
More than 500 Named Accounts | Contact sales | Contact sales | Contact sales |
Subscription licenses include software updates, maintenance and support for the term of the subscription, see About TeamPage Licenses
Perpetual License
TeamPage Perpetual License |
TeamPage (Unlimited Spaces) |
Social Enterprise Web Add |
Attivio Search Add |
25 Named Accounts | $8,750 | $5,000 | $5,000 |
50 Named Accounts | $12,500 | $5,000 | $5,000 |
100 Named Accounts | $17,500 | $10,000 | $10,000 |
200 Named Accounts | $30,000 | $10,000 | $10,000 |
500 Named Accounts | $55,000 | $20,000 | $20,000 |
More than 500 Named Accounts | Contact sales | Contact sales | Contact sales |
Perpetual licenses include software updates, maintenance and support for the first year after purchase, see About TeamPage Licenses
TeamPage Workgroup Pricing
A Traction TeamPage Workgroup configuration supports up to ten TeamPage Spaces.
Annual subscription pricing for the Workgroup configuration starts at $495/
For Attivio Plus or Cloud hosted options, please Contact sales.
Social Enterprise Web Discount: Deduct 20% from Social Enterprise Web pricing for purchases by March 31, 2012.
Annual Subscription
Annual Subscription |
TeamPage Workgroup (10 Space Limit) |
Social Enterprise Web Add |
Attivio Search Add |
25 Named Accounts | $495 | $2,500 | $2,500 |
50 Named Accounts | $995 | $2,500 | $2,500 |
100 Named Accounts | $1,995 | $5,000 | $5,000 |
200 Named Accounts | $2,995 | $5,000 | $5,000 |
500 Named Accounts | $3,995 | $10,000 | $10,000 |
More than 500 Named Accounts | Contact sales | Contact sales | Contact sales |
Subscription licenses include software updates, maintenance and support for the term of the subscription, see About TeamPage Licenses
About TeamPage Licenses
Software updates, support and maintenance
Subscription licenses pricing includes software updates, support and maintenance for the term of the subscription.
Perpetual licenses include software updates, support and maintenance for the first year at no additional cost.
Software updates includes the right to download and use new major and minor releases or patches.
Software support is provided on a self-serve basis using Traction's corporate TeamPage server.
What's a TeamPage Space ?
A Traction TeamPage Space is a work space that has its own set of tags to help organize content, and access rules which determine who can see, post, edit, comment and moderate content in that space.
What's a TeamPage Named Account ?
Traction TeamPage servers are licensed for specific number of Named Accounts.
What's a Visitor?
Any Space on a Traction TeamPage server can also be set to allow "Visitors" to read, post, comment or subscribe to public RSS/
Free Traction TeamPage License
You can download, install and use a free copy of TeamPage on your own hardware or hosted service for personal or business use.
TeamPage Attivio® Plus - Enterprise Search
Extend TeamPage Premium Search to the rest of your content with the TeamPage Attivio Plus Module.
With the Attivio Plus option, you can unlock and extend AIE to cover any content - in the enterprise or on the web! Content from SQL Databases, file servers, web sites, RSS Feeds and proprietary systems like Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange and Documentum.
Search results mix with your TeamPage results, though facet filters lets you drill down to the content any source.
Here is a search result with hits from TeamPage, SharePoint and a File Server
Expand any entry to learn more, and click through - Here you can see the Don't Just Roll the Dice search hit is expanded to reveal more meta, a link to SharePoint, and some TeamPage comments and tasks too!
Add Social Collaboration to Enterprise Content
Use the TeamPage Social Enterprise Web option to tag, task, and share content stored in these external sources.
From TeamPage Attivio Plus Enterprise Search to Big Data and Business Intelligence
AIE can also allow you arbitrarily join tables from different sources and allow you to use business intelligence tools like Spotfire, Qlik and BusinessObjects to analyze and visualize the data.
TeamPage Social Enterprise Web
Extending TeamPage discussion, tagging, and tasking to the rest of your enterprise content, and the public Web, is a snap with the Social Web option, included with TeamPage Professional and Enterprise configurations.
The module builds on the idea of Social Bookmarking and Social Tagging by unifying these concepts and extending the idea to include tasking and discussion.
Looking for integration with your intranet? You can add a TeamPage share badge or TeamPage comment widget to any page on your intranet by adding a line of Javascript.
Share the Web
With a click on a browser bookmark button or a Toolbar add-in, a TeamPage Share form pops up to allow you to share, comment on, tag, or assign a task to any web page URL.
TeamPage automatically includes an excerpt and image from the page.
For customers with TeamPage Advanced Search option, the body content of shared pages is captured and indexed along with the shared link.
Click a bookmark or the TeamPage toolbar extension to share, tag, comment or even task any Web page.
When the bookmarklet pops up, you can add your notes, pick a space and share the page.
Socialize your Intranet
Just add a line of code to any web page on your intranet - and voila! A TeamPage discussion box or badge appears.
Any time you share, tag, task, or comment on a page, the TeamPage Activity feed will also show your actions.
For customers using the TeamPage Attivio Plus module, it's also possible to share, tag, task or comment on any Attivio Plus search results which may include web pages, documents on your file servers, databases, and other resources like SharePoint, Exchange, or Documentum.
Add the discussion widget to any page on your intranet add a TeamPage comment box.
The TeamPage Badge shows a count of TeamPage social actions associated with that page.
Click the Badge to comment, tag, task or share that page - or review what other people have said and done.
TeamPage Accessories
TeamPage Feed Reader
The Feed Reader option adds the ability to read RSS or Atom feeds and publish each post into a selected Traction TeamPage space.
Traction® Instant Publisher™ (TIP)
In addition to the Web based rich text editor, TeamPage includes no-cost Traction® Instant Publisher™(TIP) client to enhance the user experience for customer who want integration with Microsoft Window Desktop and Office applications.
TeamPage TIP also includes standard support for Microsoft Outlook Social Connector.
TIP is free for all TeamPage customers.
TeamPage Attivio Content Analysis, Search, Navigation
TeamPage Attivio® option adds world-class content analysis, search and navigation.
TeamPage delivers faceted navigation by keyphrase, tag, space, author, sentiment and other metadata.
See Connected Work examples .
Traction TeamPage
Traction TeamPage integrates collaboration, communication, activity and profiles
TeamPage integrates collaborative editing (Wiki style), Twitter-style status, articles, threaded discussion, action tracking, tagging, activity, profiles, documents, and search.
Slice and scan activity by Space, Person or Tag
TeamPage’s Activity view shows posts, comments, moderation actions and more.
All items in an Activity view are automatically filtered to give each person a permission aware view.
Zoom out for a birds-eye view across all Spaces that you have permission to see.
Add a tag or add a comment on any paragraph.
TeamPage makes it easy to share content with external systems.
TeamPage calendars show collections of Tasks by Project or by Person - permission aware of course.
Read TeamPage calendars in any iCal client - including Microsoft Outlook.
Show profile and status information from TeamPage using TeamPage's free Outlook Social Connector.
Use and install TeamPage's free Traction Instant Publisher client for Microsoft and Mac desktop use.
TeamPage also integrates smoothly with incoming and outgoing email - including an automatic daily digest; email or Jabber notification; RSS or Atom syndication; LDAP or AD directory services; public Web or Enterprise Search - and more.
Traction TeamPage includes built-in action tracking
Right click to add a task to a paragraph in a page of meeting notes - or any TeamPage content - to add a tag that defines a Task.
Use TeamPage to roll up actions by Task as well as Person, Space or Tag.
“With Traction Software I can post meeting notes and assign action items to individuals.
Think: BaseCamp that Scales
See Connected Work and Traction TeamPage 5.
Try Traction now — Download TeamPage — the free 5 user version
Contact us for a live demonstration
Traction TeamPage: Connected Work
The future of work:
collaboration, conversation, identity, work product, action tracking and activity streams in context, coupled by permission-aware deep search, spanning systems of record and transactional business systems.
A question found in a customer email stored in Exchange, an issue with a new drug application filed in Documentum, a comment on a legacy document stored in SharePoint, or the S: drive of a file server, can be discovered, discussed, tagged, and tasked for follow-up action in TeamPage, without converting, importing or moving data from its original source.
This approach is affordable, practical, easy to understand, use, deploy and maintain.
TeamPage Attivio Plus leverages Attivio® Active Intelligence Engine™ (AIE) technology to provide unified information access (UIA) and deep content analysis that's simpler, more practical and more scalable than piecemeal, bottom-up integration or synchronization with each separate System of Record.
Using Traction TeamPage along with TeamPage Social Enterprise Web and Attivio Plus options, Systems of Record and the Web look and act like they are part of the same fabric, connecting people with what they create, share and use in the flow of daily work.
Seamless integration can work like the Web | W3C Social Business Jam
I just joined the Nov 2011 W3C Social Business Jam and added a discussion topic: Seamless integration can work like the Web.
The description for Seamless Integration begins: Are there effective ways to combine legacy applications with new social technologies to help foster or encourage greater use in the company? If so, can it be done incrementally?
I propose:
.
. . integration of social software (now "systems of engagement") and transactional systems where work gets done (now "systems of record"), using the same W3C protocols and layers over W3C protocols that make the public Web successful: Web-standard content delivery, links, and link-aware search. " The world inside a social business differs from the public Web in many significant ways: a) it's much smaller; b) it's very link-deprived compared to the public Web; c) there's a lot of redundant content (think of all of the copies of the same slide deck distributed in email); d) some highly valuable content isn't linkable at all (think legacy systems of record); e) finer-grain permissioned access rules are much more important when you want to open up the most of what the business does, and what people in the business know.
On the plus side, social business activity adds valuable context. This bring issues like consistent and reliable identity, consistent and reliable access controls (over W3C protocols), representation of context, and permission aware search to the top of the queue.
I believe these issues can be addressed by system architecture and layering of services over base level W3C protocols, which may eventually lead to extension or additional layers of W3C protocols.
Then use Doug Engelbart's model linking Knowledge Product (systems of record), Dialog (systems of engagement), External Intelligence (email, public Web, other social businesses) as examples.
See Seamless integration can work like the Web - in the W3C Social Business Jam.
Related
15-16 Nov 2011 | Traction Software Enterprise 2.0 Santa Clara
Traction Software's Greg Lloyd and Jordan Frank will be at Enterprise 2.0 Santa Clara Booth #208 15-16 Nov 2011.
TeamPage's Social Enterprise Web option gives you freedom to add a Task tag, comment or share pages you find on the public Web or your company's intranet.
TeamPage’s Attivio Plus option fuses TeamPage and External Systems of Record to work like the Web
TeamPage integrates search and discussion.
Don't miss Greg Lloyd on Tony Byrne's panel Marketplace Choices: Platform vs Products panel, Tuesday 15 Nov 2:30-3:30pm.
Conference Details This year's Enterprise 2.
29 Oct 2011 | KMWorld - Rich options expand the collaborative horizon
Writing in KMWorld Magazine Judith Lamont quotes Forrester Analyst Rob Koplowitz: "Many companies are placing a big bet on collaboration to support their business activities.
One of the first steps taken was to provide the community with information that had been scarce or expensive.
"We arranged with the publisher of the Wheat Rust Atlas to put a PDF version of the book on our site," Bakum says. "The book was out of print but was a valuable resource, and now it's available to all the researchers. " The website helps expedite the administrative aspects of conducting research.
Forms to request screening for wheat rust or dispatching seeds that may be resistant to the disease are available on the website, for example. "If a lab in Canada has a variety of wheat that may be resistant, researchers can send it to nurseries in Ethiopia and Kenya, where it can be grown and tested. Our website acts as a central place for that data, benefiting researchers around the world," Bakum explains. "
Because members upload files into collaboration workspaces via e-mail, some content arrives in the form of attachments."Attivio searches Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets and other types of files, even if they are attachments," Bakum says. Much of the site is public, but TeamPage allows for the creation of internal spaces that are password protected, to enable private virtual meetings.
» Read the full story
See also Borlaug Global Rust Initiative
19 Nov 2010 | Borlaug Global Rust Initiative Wins 2010 Forrester Groundswell Social Impact Award
Ada Lovelace Day | Betts Wald, US Naval Research Lab
Ada Lovelace Day celebrates the contributions of women in science and technology.
Ada icon by Sidney Padua: I strongly recommend that you download the thrilling adventures of Babbage & Lovelace for your iPad, and see author Sydney Padua's excellent 2D Goggles site.
7 Oct 2011 | Jacob Morgan - Emergent Collaboration Vendor Review: Traction Software
"I’ve seen the Traction product a few times now I have to say that I really like it and not just for small and medium size businesses.
Jacob continues: "I think their approach to using search as the backbone behind collaboration is also very unique, in fact they are the only vendor that I have spoken to which highlights search and discusses it in such an integral way.
See Connected Work
Related Traction Software Introduces Social Enterprise Web
Are Enterprise 2.0 & Web 2.0 Different? | KMWorld 2011 Panel, Thur Nov 3, 2011 Washington DC
KMWorld 2011 Panel C303 2pm-2:45pm Thur Nov 3, 2011.
Panel
Jordan Frank, VP, Sales & Business Development - Traction Software
Sid Probstein, Chief Technology Officer - Attivio
Paul Fisher, Senior Policy Advisor - FDA
Marcelus DeCoulode, Strategy & Operations - Deloitte Consulting
More on this session.
See KMWorld 2011 Nov 1-3 Washington Marriott Wardman Park, Washington DC.
Athens Group - Traction TeamPage for Quality Management, Training and Knowledge Base
Athens Group is an independent consulting firm based in Houston, Texas.
Using TeamPage, Athens Group is able to quickly and cost-effectively train a greater number of Drilling Technology Assurance℠ (DTA) consultants, enabling the company to provide its DTA services to a rapidly growing client base.
About Athens Group
Athens Group provides independent, third-party technology assurance services for high-specification Oil & Gas drilling and production systems.
Before Traction TeamPage
In 2009, Athens Group was faced with the need to scale its training and quality management systems to accommodate its rapid growth.
- Consolidate AGQMS for more streamlined change management and greater internal visibility
- Keep up with the demand for its services by enabling new hires to more quickly remove any gaps in their knowledge, become well versed in the Athens Group proprietary Proven Practices, and become productive DTA Consultants
Benefits of Traction TeamPage
“No, really, we want you to edit our intranet first day on the job.
This oft-repeated conversation highlights three reasons why Athens Group selected Traction TeamPage over competitive systems:
- Ease of editing by anyone in the company
- A full audit trail of all changes
- Ability to have a mix of open and moderated spaces
The ability to export collections to Word and PDF, subscribe to pages and spaces, and use keyword tags were other important features for the fast-growing company.
Less than a year after implementation of the company’s Traction TeamPage based Intranet, adoption has been rapid, as shown in the following graph.
By building its company Intranet using Traction TeamPage technology, Athens Group has been able to:
- Consolidate disparate sources of company knowledge into a single portal
- Streamline its training and knowledge management processes
Athens Group Quality Management System (AGQMS)
The Traction TeamPage deployment of AGQMS was designed and implemented under the auspices David Wight, the Director of Quality for Athens Group, who has designed several ISO-certified quality systems.
The AGQMS space’s home page is a comprehensive home page on the Intranet, with links to top-level articles:
Athens Group chose to make AGQMS a moderated space, creating an audit trail of approvals as well as edits.
Using the tagging capabilities in TeamPage, each page is assigned an owner and an approver.
Athens Group Knowledge Portal
As a consulting services organization, accessibility to corporate knowledge is a core value that Athens Group provides for its clients.
To aid knowledge transfer, Athens Group created its own taxonomy of industry keywords.
Similar tags for clients, vendors, operators, rigs, and so forth enabled creation of section driven pages that dynamically build themselves as Athens Groups adds new clients, rigs and projects to its ever-expanding list of successful delivery of DTA services.
These lists are self-maintaining, because any time a new project or lesson learned or other page is tagged with the rig name, TeamPage will automatically update the list.
Traction TeamPage’s ability to use tags and dynamic sections has resulted in a highly cross-linked, yet zero-maintenance knowledge portal.
DTA Training Curriculum
The increasing demand for Athens Group’s DTA services created the need for scalability in the training process.
The DTA Training space implements this approach and has greatly improved the scalability of Athens Group’s training program.
Each of the training pages may have links to many other spaces, such as AGQMS, Company Info, or DTA Proven Practices.
New hires who are seasoned veterans from other leading companies in the industry have consistently say that the Athens Group Intranet, quality system, and training program is the best they've ever seen.
The Future of Traction TeamPage at Athens Group
Athens Group’s Traction TeamPage based Intranet allowed the company to better leverage its AGQMS system and reduce the training time needed before DTA consultants are ready to be assigned to projects.
See TeamPage Solutions: Quality Management
Related
Aug 2014 | Providence Business News - Social tools being adapted for Web-based QC tool
1 Sept 2011 | KMWorld names TeamPage A Trend-Setting Product of 2011
KMWorld recognized Traction Software's TeamPage as a Trend-Setting Product for 2011.
What's the 2.0 of Enterprise 2.0? Or, How to Be Emergent?
Hat tip to Professor +Andrew McAfee for pointing out Do Happier People Work Harder? my nomination for Required Reading of the Day (#RRD).
Over the past half-decade Amabile and Kramer researched micro-level causes behind this problem, collecting nearly 12,000 electronic diary entries from 238 professionals in seven different companies.
1) ".
2) "Gallup estimates the cost of America’s disengagement crisis at a staggering $300 billion in lost productivity annually.
3) Managers can help insure that people are happily engaged at work - I believe Peter Drucker would claim that's the primary responsibility of management.
Amabile and Kramer say:
"Workers’ well-being depends, in large part, on managers’ ability and willingness to facilitate workers’ accomplishments — by removing obstacles, providing help and acknowledging strong effort.
"Most managers don’t understand the negative consequences of this struggle.
"This failure reflects a common experience inside organizations.
That's good news - but not really news.
Technology can't create a great enterprise, but it can open the door for innovation in how any enterprise operates - from micro to macro scale - including how it operates with external stakeholders, customers and suppliers.
I've persistently said that the 2.
I'm no sociologist, but Amabile and Kramer seem to support the view that socialization in the context of everyday work - rather than as a separate "social" duty while at work - may be best.
Repeating points from Enterprise 2.0 Schism in 2009: 1) It's not just the technology; 2) It's not just the people; 3) An effective organization is a social invention that is created or shaped to serve extraordinary ends, and that may be the most valuable invention of all.
"The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary humans beings to do extraordinary things.
See Amabile and Kramer's New York Times column, and read their July 2011 book The Progress Principle (Forbes interview).
Do Happier People Work Harder? By Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer New York Times Sunday Review, September 4, 2011
G+ discussion on +David McRaney's The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight and how emergent behavior is not all unicorns and rainbows.
Need for Incentives, and other Innovation Myths - The most powerful incentives are intrinsic, not "pay to share" games.
Enterprise 2.0 Schism - Why Doug Engelbart and Peter Drucker should be declared Patron Saints of E2.
Peter Drucker and Enterprise 2.0 - Drucker Centenary Nov 2009
Doug Engelbart | 85th Birthday Jan 20, 2010
See G+ for original post and discussion
Enterprise photo courtesy US Navy.
I don't know what a picture of an "Enterprise 2.
23 Aug 2011 | Financial Times - Tapping the Full Power of Social Software as a Strategic Tool
Writing in the 23 Aug 2011 Financial Times, John Hagel and John Seely Brown of the Deloitte Center for the Edge advise CIO's how to improve performance, usually without increasing spending.
Extending the fabric of work, or How to Be Emergent
I enjoyed reading Dion Hincliffe's Putting Social Business to Work and G+ discussion led by Luis Suarez on Laurie Buczek's The Big Failure of Enterprise 2.
An edict from management or prayer from internal evangelist to "be social" is often translated: "how many hours a week?" and "instead of doing what?" A top down Knowledge Management edict: "share what you know" turns into a empty Friday afternoon exercise that's soon abandoned.
In both cases bottom-up capture of conversations, actions, responses to routine or exceptional issues, and human actions in context is a much better way to deliver what knowledge management and social business promise.
This includes free-form accidental discoveries and introductions to folk throughout the organization who aren't usually involved or aware of what others are doing.
Enterprise 2.
Sharing activity streams across systems of record is one way to avoid the siloed discussion trap.
I believe that the best solution will include permission-aware search than spans activity streams and systems of record to make documents, individual email messages, SQL database records from CAD/
At E2.
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.
Large companies have enormous IT teams promising enterprise-wide search and collaboration with roadmaps stretching years into the future and budgets of seven to ten figures or more.
You'll hear more about this soon [or contact us to learn more now].
Related
- 21 June 2011 | Traction Software Introduces Social Enterprise Web
- Alcoa Fastening Systems - Groundswell 2011 Award Nomination for Collaboration
- Introducing Online Workplaces - Greg's notes on Larry Cannell's July 2011 Webinar - Online workplace
- Fixing Enterprise Search - spanning systems of record
- Intertwingled Work - connecting work across multiple sources
- Knowledge Fishing vs.
Knowledge Farming - Grass roots knowledge management - 20 June 2005 | Supernova | Why Can't a Business Work More Like the Web?
On G+ see
Luis Suarez - 24 Aug 2011
Dion Hinchcliffe - 24 Aug 2011
Greg Lloyd - 24 Aug 2011
Lipstick on a Pig
On Aug 5, 2011, Andrew McAfee opened a public discussion on Google+ by sharing How Apple (unintentionally) revolutionized corporate IT by Aaron Levie.
Greg Lloyd - This may also radically reduce the roll-out time for new corporate capabilities designed to use native Web infrastructure including HTML5, GWT and other technologies that deliver a user experience on par with the public Web.
The same applies to back end services and IT's ability to acquire, deploy, adapt and support back end services more rapidly and effectively.
Contrast aggressive internal awa external use of Web tech and architecture by IT versus the interlocking three, four, or five year update cycles using the MS stack (or others) and update cyles of IT systems that depend on and lag MS by years.
A very highly placed person in government told me: "Traditional IT architecture and practice almost guarantees that any new initiative will be late, grossly over budget, and obsolete before it is delivered.
Forcing change to a Web-like approach from front end mobile and user experience expectations can shift IT back to focus on timely response and business value rather than plumbing.
Dan Camper - +Greg Lloyd I agree with you, so long as the problem (and solution!) domain remains within the "corporate capabilities designed to use native Web infrastructure.
There is sometimes a tendency for IT to force an inappropriate solution onto the customer merely to make IT's life easier.
An IT department would do well to treat its internal customers as if they where external, paying customers instead.
Greg Lloyd - +Dan Camper I agree.
I believe that the 5-10 year shift in corporate technologies and infrastructure Andy envisions should and will move toward: 1) traditional, transactional "systems of record" - ERP, MRP, Accounting, CAD/
Issues of enterprise wide authentication, secure access, permission aware search spanning "systems of record" and "systems of engagement" at enterprise rather than public Web scale can and have been successfully addressed - at least in early stages.
For thoughts on this shift in IT architecture, see:
July 2010 | Intertwingled Work - Observable work as an activity spanning systems of record
And a step in that direction (Note - I am President and co-founder of Traction Software)
June 2011 | Traction Social Enterprise Web - "Marrying Deep Search and Collaboration"
In this case (and others) it's putting our money where our mouth is, not vice versa.
These are quotes from a public GooglePlus discussion - feel free to join in.
Related
Reinventing the Web on how we got here
Building pleasant and stable islands in a storm-tossed sea on extending the Web
A Circle is not a Space on GooglePlus experiments and notes
Note: The only iStock photo I could find with lipstick on pig used a piggy bank rather than a real porker.
3 Aug 2011 | Alcoa Fastening Systems: What were you doing at 7:15AM Saturday July 2, 2011? Joe Crumpler was working.
What were you doing at 7:15AM Saturday July 2, 2011? Sleeping? Getting ready for a Fourth of July weekend picnic or a trip to the beach? Joe Crumpler of Alcoa Fastening Systems (AFS) was reaching for his iPad to review status for the world wide roll-out of an Oracle upgrade scheduled for the holiday weekend.
I put it to the test Friday morning at 12:01 am.
I held a kickoff meeting for the leadership of the Oracle upgrade project. We set the plan for starting the upgrade process and discussed communication strategy. Project hand-offs were to be explicitly communicated by email. Project work journals were to be handled by a Traction Teampage status update. My test had begun. I finally went to bed at 1:30 am.
I woke up Saturday morning at 7:15 am. I reached for my iPad so that I could check my email feed before even getting out of bed. I had subscribed to the feed for the project’s workspace the day before. My inbox was full of one-line status updates. It looked like a Twitter feed. I was happy to see that most of the volume came from Traction status reports. I read for 20 minutes before starting the morning status meeting. I had a basic understanding of everything of importance on the project before the meeting started; including all of the problems. More importantly, I knew we were behind schedule.
Fortunately for the team's rollout and holiday weekend, Joe's planned status meetings were reduced to two thirty-minute checkins per day (an 80% reduction over meeting practice before using TeamPage):
One of the reasons I use Traction Teampage for project management is that, if used properly, it dramatically reduces the need for project status meetings.
I managed the China and Newbury Park’s QAD projects using two 30-minute long meetings per day. This freed team members to focus on working instead of wasting time in meetings. Unfortunately, the acquisition project required hours of meetings per day because the information flow was cumbersome, and my system had failed me. The good news is, for the Oracle upgrade, I am using two meetings per day. One in the morning, and one in the evening. This is how the 30-minute meeting works.
(1) Start with a review of the open issues.
Team members use status updates to identify issues.
We make one issue tracking article per day, which resides in the project management workspace. The title of each issue is listed, along with a link to the task. We create a task for each issue. We track these within the go-live milestone on the Oracle upgrade project. We briefly discuss each issue. The goal is to describe the issue and its impact, and then assign who does what and by when. (2) A five minute update:
The next step is for the project process owner.
the person who has responsibility for executing the next step in the project, to give a five-minute update on the project. This normalizes project status across the team and is essential for team continuity. It also gives the team a better understanding of their comments and work schedule. (3) New issues:
We ask each team member about potential issues.
All issues are welcome, including the minutia of the project. Each issue is described accurately. We assess the potential impact and assign the issue an owner. The owner is responsible for resolving the issue or developing a plan that supports the project timeline. We record all three steps in Traction so that a wider audience can follow the project.
The first step is a static article. The second step represents the latest status posts via Traction’s project management interface. The third step updates a static page with links to tasks from Traction’s project management interface. We tie each issue to the go-live milestone. Since this is a first attempt at using the status update capability, I’ve had to push my team to use it.
It is not mandatory, but it is strongly encouraged. So far, they are exceeding my expectations. I think this is because a status update is easy to do and takes no more effort than tweeting. Plus, the post has no overhead. Team members simply write about accomplishments. It only takes few seconds.
The outcome of the four day go live process was successful.
We managed almost 180 issues to closure using the Traction project and task management capabilities.
We identified go live issues within a “Go live Issues Log” milestone, and that is visible in the screenshot. As of this screenshot, we closed 175 out of 179 issues identified. The benefit we realized from using Traction here come from everyone on the technical team being on the same page, being able to collaborate through the issue itself rather than in parallel email streams, and being able to communicate clearly to our internal customers about the status of issues encountered. The benefit realized here is that it was a critical success factor in the go live process, and we supplemented issue identification and resolution with the status update (like a Twitter feed) to provide people with project-related information during the 4-day go live process. The project went live successfully and all remaining open issues are being tracked separately as part of our operational processes.
Pin-point focus on activities associated with a specific Task, Project or Milestone is extremely valuable when you need to stay on top of rapidly changing, time sensitive and critical activities such as the Oracle rollout.
Every action, status, post or search result also gives you one click access to the Profile of the person behind that activity, allowing you to learn more, contact that person, or see the person's status and activity stream (like all content, streams or searches, clipped to what you have permission to read).
Integrated collaboration, communication, action tracking and search using the TeamPage model offers a big advantage: add a Task tag to any paragraph in a Wiki page, status post or other TeamPage item.
In Social Software for Business Performance - Some Perspective, Brian writes:
Working in the same platform as our procedures and documentation allows for some interesting things to happen, again, leveraging core hypertext /
linking services. For example, we are doing a major system modification project, and one deliverable is to update the documentation for that system. We can associate a task from that project to the procedure in our [TeamPage] documentation wiki. Depending on the context, I see that something needs to be done to that procedure.
- In the project context, I see a task pointing me to the procedure and calling for action.
- In the procedure context, I see a task on the procedure, referencing the project.
- In the user profile context, the assignee will see the task assigned to her, pointing both to the procedure itself and the project that generated the task.
- It’s the same content, the same base URL, referenced in 3 different spaces but all linked together.
Brian is providing his background and perspective on Alcoa Fastening System's participation in the Feb 2011 Deloitte Center for the Edge Study: “Social Software For Business Performance: The missing link in social software: Measurable business performance improvements”
Brian's team at AFS maintained internal metrics of performance over a three year period - before and after adoption of Traction TeamPage - that enabled them to