The company may get overshadowed by Socialtext and Atlassian, but it's not for lack of trying.Traction is jazzing up TeamPage Release 3.8, a piece of software that is used to help businesses collaborate on projects in an online workspace, with new draft moderation and linking utilities.
With TeamPage 3.8, Traction is intent on being a survivor in a space where anything can happen.
To that end, the new software, launched Nov. 12, features draft moderation to let business managers control new content from users they dont know, Jordan Frank, vice president of marketing for Traction, told eWEEK.
Click here to read more about Socialtext reloading with new CEO, funding.
This is important, Frank said, because some companies have customers who need to police what people are putting on wikis for legal reasons in such fields as competitive intelligence or research and development.
The other case for moderation is to save a series of pages that need to be changed over a span a month. The typical wiki environment must be changed page by page and results published as you go.
Not so for TeamPage 3.8, which lets authors see, search and review all drafts for collaboration, or flip back to see and use the latest stable view of all pages.
Traction is playing in an increasingly competitive market for business wiki software, but Frank said one of the competitive differentiators is TeamPages ability to let users see multiple wiki pages at the same time, while others offer page-at-a-time viewing.
Unique features aside, there is yet no real silver bullet for success in the online collaboration space and therefore no real financial valuation for the business wiki market.
However, analysts say the online collaboration market seems positioned for growth and consolidation. There has been some hard evidence of the latter.
Google bought JotSpot Oct. 31, 2006, and will likely shoehorn it in to its Apps offerings, while smaller vendors such as FatWire purchased Infostoria Oct. 29 for wiki software.
More broadly, Yahoo Sept. 17 agreed to buy Web mail and collaboration software maker Zimbra for $350 million.
Yahoo bids for Zimbra. Click here to read more.
A key to any wiki is its navigability. Accordingly, TeamPage 3.8 now makes linking accessible to techies and the not-so-tech-savvy users, offering an improved GUI (graphical user interface) to let anyone with TeamPage permissions forward links to new content as well as links to existing content or external sites.
The new GUI also makes it simple to link to Traction sections to files that are attached to article pages or stored in Tractions Web share folders.
Users now have a place to look when they discover that a new page has taken over an old pages name, thanks to a new forward-linking feature set with accurate referencing and name aliases across projects.
TeamPage 3.8 also lets users show the latest stable version of wiki pages without depriving others of the ability to edit the pages. This alleviates the pains associated with refactoring and sharing pages across wiki project spaces.
Traction TeamPage Release 3.8 will be available for preview use this month and will ship later this quarter.
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