Traction taps Weblogs for information gathering

PROVIDENCE, R.I.- Traction Software is taking the trendy publishing concept of Weblogs and providing companies with a way to glean useful information from them by collecting, presenting and analyzing content for competitive and business gains.

The company this week will release TeamPage for Competitive Intelligence and Market Research, add-on software for its flagship TeamPage product released in July.

The collaboration software lets users collect data from e-mail, the Web, intranets, business-analysis systems and various document formats, and distribute it via a browser-based Weblog news page where users can view, edit and annotate the information.

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PROVIDENCE, R.I.- Traction Software is taking the trendy publishing concept of Weblogs and providing companies with a way to glean useful information from them by collecting, presenting and analyzing content for competitive and business gains.

The company this week will release TeamPage for Competitive Intelligence and Market Research, add-on software for its flagship TeamPage product released in July.

The collaboration software lets users collect data from e-mail, the Web, intranets, business-analysis systems and various document formats, and distribute it via a browser-based Weblog news page where users can view, edit and annotate the information.

The key is what Traction calls its Hypertext Journaling System, which allows for labeling and cross-linking of all the data stored on the Java-based Traction Server. The labels and links create context and a timeline for seemingly unrelated bits of information collected from various sources.

"The competitive intelligence process often bogs down in collecting and distributing information," says Arik Johnson, managing director of Aurora WDC, a consulting and outsourcing firm for competitive intelligence services. "That takes away from the analytical process and makes people more like librarians than intelligence analysts."

He says Traction lets him easily collect and publish data and organize that data and most importantly get feedback. "We can clip, cut and paste data into the Weblog, and then add comments and opinions. It's more efficient than copying and pasting articles into our document management system."

Traction works via a plug-in to a browser that adds an icon to the interface. The plug-in lets users highlight information they see on screen, click the Traction icon and send the information to the Traction Server. The information is posted in a Weblog as an article with an "author" and a time stamp or sent to end users through e-mail as part of a newsletter called an Executive Summary. Users also can contribute e-mail by sending or forwarding it to an address hosted on any mail server that can be read by the Traction Server. The server supports controls that let users right click on the Weblog data to add comments and labels to data.

Traction, which has a built-in Web server and database, supports access controls, Secure Sockets Layer encryption and a search engine similar to Google that allow for searches on time, content or topic.

"Personal Weblog software lacks those enterprise controls," says Tim Simonson, CEO of Traction. He says the software complements other teamware collaboration tools such as eRoom from eRoom Technologies, Lotus QuickPlace and Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server, which are for more structured documents. "Traction pulls together highly unstructured information," Simonson says.

The software competes with an open-source database tool called Wiki, which also lets users edit Web-based content.

TeamPage for Competitive Intelligence and Market Research runs on Linux, Macintosh OS X, Sun Solaris, and Windows NT, XP and 2000.

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