Traction Software Inc. is trying to bring the wildly popular Internet technology known as Weblogs, or “blogs” as theyre better known, to the enterprise as a content management and collaboration tool.
The Providence, R.I.-based company announced this week new versions of its TeamPage Enterprise Weblog technology specifically designed for marketing professionals conducting competitive intelligence and market research.
Company officials say the new offering, known as Traction CI, allows users to collect, organize and share competitive intelligence from multiple sources.
Officials said Traction CI can capture content from e-mail, the Web, external news feeds, business analytic systems or authored contact reports and then provide a flexible labeling structure to organize the content by topic.
Users can then add comments to call out key points, or label items of interest for future reference or to alert executive teams to critical information. Hot links can also be added to tell readers where to find related content.
Information collected can then be automatically published via a user-specific, daily e-mail newsletter, using the companys ExecutiveSummary technology, or secure intranet-based project news pages.
Readers can navigate through newspages or search by any combination of project, label, author, time, and full text, company officials said.
The Traction Server is a Java application that can be installed and configured on any computer that runs Java, including Windows XP, NT or 2000, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X.
The software uses Microsoft and Netscape Web browsers and also supports wireless access from Palm, Windows CE or Blackberry browsers.
Traction CI is available now and priced at $10,000 per server and $125 per named account, plus 20 percent for annual maintenance and support. Traction also offers a 15-user workgroup package for $4,995.