What’s Next in Wikis and Weblogs?

Greg Lloyd – President & Co-Founder

Traction Software Inc

grl@tractionsoftware.com

What’s Next In Weblogs and Wiki’s

• Business purpose: Enterprise 2.0• A unified model for working communication – Collaboration in place: Wiki style– Collaboration over time: Blog style

• Secure, scalable collaboration “at the edge” as well as within the enterprise

• Classic Hypertext that links, scales and works like the Web

Focus on commercial and government enterprise market– Over fifteen Fortune 500 Customers

– Over ten Global 100 Customers in US, Japan, and Europe

– Seven of Top Twenty Global Pharma Companies

– In-Q-Tel (funded by the CIA) is a strategic investor

Addressing over 1,000,000 Enterprise Users daily– Providing simple, secure, scalable working communication– Pharma, Finance, Manufacturing, Government are early adopters

Initial applications: – Competitive Intelligence– Issue tracking– Product Management / Project Management / R&D

Emerging applications: – Extended enterprise (customer + supply chain) product

management– Consultant / client communication– Corporate communication / SEC financial reporting

Traction Software Summary

Beyond blogs and wikis

Blogs, Wikis and Beyond: New Alternatives for Collaboration and Communication

Peter O’Kelly, Senior Analyst, Burton Group, March 2005

Although Traction's products are marketed as “enterprise weblog” offerings, they are in fact powerful hypertext systems that exploit blog- and wiki-related advances to maximize simplicity but also do so on a scale that addresses elaborate hypertext application scenarios that would overwhelm wiki alternatives.

Although Traction's products are marketed as “enterprise weblog” offerings, they are in fact powerful hypertext systems that exploit blog- and wiki-related advances to maximize simplicity but also do so on a scale that addresses elaborate hypertext application scenarios that would overwhelm wiki alternatives.

[Traction TeamPage] comes closest to bringing the visions of hypertext pioneer Doug Engelbart to fruition, and that it is also a very useful leading indicator in terms of features other vendors will eventually add.

[Traction TeamPage] comes closest to bringing the visions of hypertext pioneer Doug Engelbart to fruition, and that it is also a very useful leading indicator in terms of features other vendors will eventually add. Hypertext and Compound/Interactive Document Models:

Collaboration and Content Management Implications Peter O’Kelly, Senior Analyst, Burton Group, October 2006

Best Enterprise Wiki

Traction TeamPage • What’s the concept ?• What’s the model ?• How does it fit ?

– A valuable business purpose– A slot in the enterprise IT architecture – A Day in the Life of John Smith at XYZ Corp

– Communities of Interest (COI) / COP– Security for a Virtual Team Room

A Wiki is like a house

Built by many people …

A Blog is like the record of building the house …

A Blog is like the record of building the house …

A Blog is like the record of building the house …

A Blog is like the record of building the house …

Collaboration needs blog and wiki views

working together

The product you wish to build, sell and support

The external intelligence, dialog, and decisions of teams working together over time to create and sustain the product

1968 NLS (oN Line System). A Hypertext Journal for high performance teams

1992 Towards High Performance Organizations: A Strategic Role for Groupware

Douglas Engelbart - Hypertext for High Performance Teams

Dialog, External Intelligence, Knowledge Product

Journal + Web = Traction

• Stable content• Paragraph addressable• Built-in time order• Flexible viewspecs for assembly of content

• Web browser interface• Web linkable• Easily authored• Each server creates a cluster of secure spaces

Business Purpose • Competitive Intelligence• Sales Communication• Research and Development Journals• Program / Project Communication• Corporate Communication and Financial Reporting• Exception tracking• Manufacturing and operations log• Process improvement / process certification

TeamPage creates many secure, shareable, searchable spacesSecurity makes it possible to open selected spaces to the extended enterprise (customers, suppliers, resellers, PR, legal and other advisors), while giving internal stakeholders a global view

Collaboration needs blog and wiki views

working together

The product you wish to build, sell and support

The external intelligence, dialog, and decisions of teams working together over time to create and sustain the product

Collaboration needs blog and wiki views

working together

The Concept• Replace the “cloud of email” with a persistent layer of linked pages, posts, comments and tags

• Create a permission model which does not break search, links or relationships,

• But which expands or limits what you see based on appropriate norms for internal as well as external groups

Appropriate Norms?• Customers, key suppliers, reseller partners, PR firm, and university consultants:– Read some spaces– Comment on others– Post and edit in others– Use more private spaces for working communication with you (excluding others)

• Your internal teams need a spectrum of private and public spaces too …

• For social purposes, as well as a small number legitimate legal, HR, and corporate functions

The Model• Work like the web:

– Skins for search engines– RSS/Atom Syndication– Simple views and mashups

• Layered over a Hypertext Journal with– Stable bi-direction links and relations– Permission filtered SLATE spaces– Deeply intertwingled tags and comments– A rich corpus linked to and from the Web

Creating stable islands in a

tempest-tossed sea

Traction TeamPage – Architecture

Traction Core LayerPure Java and proprietaryImplements Journal, ACL and key abstractionsMultiple implementations

Traction SDK LayerPure Java and openFree use of class library, source, JavaDoc to extend the SDK and SDL

Traction TeamPageDemo

Partner Integration Example – QL2 Software

CI Staff can use inline comments and labels to analyze and decide what to post for broad use.

Respond in hours or minutes - not days or weeks.

Automatically capture web site changes and search results

Publish and interact with the content in Traction.

Day in the Life of John Smith at XYZ Corp

XYZ Corp has entered into an agreement with Customer1 and Customer2 to build a Motion Tracking Integration Box (MTIB)

Multi-divisional project with XYZ Corp R&D and Engineering leads

Product Lifecycle Management model start quickly “on spec” and grows over 12 to 18 months

An international outside supplier Supplier1 will lead the MTBI team if the prototype moves to full production

A day in the Life …

Collaboration needs blog and wiki views

working together

ReferencesBuilding Pleasant and Stable Islands in a Storm-Tossed Sea, Greg Lloyd

www.TractionSoftware.com ref Blog395 May 16, 2007

Enterprise 2.0: Letting Hypertext out of its Box, Greg Lloyd www.TractionSoftware.com ref Blog384 April 24, 2007

Flip Test 1971 | Email vs Journal, Greg Lloyd www.TractionSoftware.com ref Blog332 Jan 15, 2007

Traction Roots - Doug Engelbart, Greg Lloyd www.TractionSoftware.com ref Blog50 April 9, 2006

Why Can’t a Business Work More like the Web? (.pdf) Greg Lloyd, Super Nova 2005 point paper, June 20, 2005 www.TractionSoftware.com ref Public390 Oct 9, 2005

The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialization, John Hagel III and John Seely Brown, HBS Press 2005

Social Software and the Politics of Groups, Clay Shirky, www.shirky.com, March 3, 2003

Re-Place-ing Space: The Roles of Place and Space in Collaborative systems, Steve Harrison and Paul Dourish, Proceedings of CSCW '96

Toward High-Performance Organizations: A Strategic Role for Groupware, Douglas C. Engelbart, Bootstrap Institute, June 1992 (AUGMENT,132811)

NLS TELECONFERENCING FEATURES: The Journal, and Shared-Screen Telephoning, Douglas C. Engelbart, Compcon 75 Digest, Sep 1975 pp 173-178 (AUGMENT,33076)

Contact

Greg LloydPresident and Co-Foundergrl@tractionsoftware.com(401)-528-1145

Traction Software, Inc.245 Waterman StreetSuite 309Providence, RI 02906

www.TractionSoftware.com

                               

Backup

At a Glance: Traction Software IncMarket Focus

– Secure, scalable Blog and Wiki Software for enterprise use

Background– Founders: Two founders with 5 decades of hypertext experience– Funding: In-Q-Tel (venture arm of the CIA), Slater Interactive and private investors

– Advisor: Professor Andy van Dam, Brown University and Microsoft Research Advisory Board, Hypertext pioneer

Business Focus– Global 1000 and Government focus in US, Japan, Europe– Strong positions in pharma, finance, manufacturing, government– Building strong partnerships: FAST Search & Transfer, QL2 Software– “Enterprise 2.0” is sparking customer and channel interest

Award Winning Product and Market Leading Position– Current Release: 3.7.3– InfoWorld 2007 Technology of the Year - Best Enterprise Wiki– Industry Recognition: Top 100 Awards from KMWorld, eContent, Red Herring

– Top Reviews: Burton Group, Forrester Research, InfoWorld, Intranet Journal, Federal Computer Week, Fuld & Company and more. Best Enterprise Wiki

The Traction Platform - What’s Different?

• Collaborative hypertext journal for Individuals and Groups working over time• “Hypertext Journaling” system maintains best of breed audit trail

– Robust mechanism for handling edits and cross references over time• Journal made up of “project” spaces

– Each project is analogous to a blog or a wiki space• Permissions are defined for the projects

– Using standard Access Control Lists– Integrated with Active Directory and LDAP

• Paragraph level cross project commenting, linking and labeling (social tagging)

– An article in one project can be labeled “FAQ” or “Important” in another project• Labels also expose content from one project to another

– Direct a comment on an article in Project A to a more private Project B– Make bi-directional links between articles or comments regardless of project

– Comments, Labels and Links are permission filtered• Traction Views

– Deliver any content slice or set of slices and– Are filtered based on sum of your permissions as well as any query– Can be subscribed to via RSS

• Skins control look & feel, and function– Traction delivers different skins to different people (or software agents) at the same time

Traction TeamPage – Technical Overview

• Java/J2SE Application– Simple installers for Windows, Solaris, Linux, MAC OSX– No dependencies (e.g. CGI, Perl, PHP, MySQL, etc.)

• Journal records all changes (articles, comments, label changes, emails sent out, etc.)– Articles have automatic edit history with Wikimedia style differences view– WebDAV manages attachments to record file version history– Journal indexed for optimized for view delivery

• Security and Authentication– Built-in user management, or connect to Active Directory, LDAP, or others via plug-in– Supports TLS and TLS with X.509 certificates, NTLM, and LDAP Authentication

• Access Control List driven permissions– Fine grained permission controls (Author, Comment, Read, Read Own, Edit, Edit Own, Erase, Erase Own, Change Labels, Make Labels, Project Admin, etc.)

– Built-in WebDAV web folders included in permissioned access model– Permission sensitive FAST search option including drill-down content navigation, RSS/ATOM query feeds

• Internationalized interface + Unicode (UTF-8)– Localized for Japanese, German, French; Supports local vocabulary overrides (e.g. Surfer dude)

• SDK and SDL (skin definition language) allow for customization– Create new skins, views, and reports — HTML, XML, CSV, text, etc.

• User Preferences– “Skins” are basis for most views, are selectable and customizable by user preference– Time zone preferences

Traction TeamPage – Inputs

• Traction Instant Publisher– Optional .NET client for Windows desktop and Internet Explorer integration– Internet Explorer “blog selection”, or drag and drop capture of text, images, and back link to source

– Drag/drop attachments – Built-in screen capture tool

• XML-RPC and SOAP– Use most blog publishing tools to post to Traction via XML-RPC– Perl Traction publish script posts via SOAP

• Zero Footprint Rich Text Editor– For new posts, edits, comments– Works in Mozilla, Firefox, Internet Explorer

• Widgets can be produced quickly and published with a widget tool• Custom forms

– Create custom forms with SDL and JavaScript– Can take advantage of the rich text editor

• Email– Projects can read a POP3 or IMAP mailbox; SSL and STARTTLS supported for all connections.

– Author by email permission per project– Rules-based automatic label application (labels from any project)

• With Traction TeamPage Feed Reader module:– Read and publish RSS / Atom feeds into Traction– Rules based automatic label application (labels from any project)

Traction TeamPage – Outputs

• Skins and Views– Standard views include: front page, news page, topic navigation with extensible view types

– Simple skin for PDAs and Phones– Search skin for spiders– RSS/ATOM skins for aggregators and data mining tools

• Notification– RSS/ATOM – Best of breed implementation

• Secure, Authenticated, Dynamic (based on permission filter and search criteria)• Subscribe to anything you can imagine searching for

– Automated Email Newsletter• Permission filtered, sent at regular interval, including a paragraph from new articles and comments

• Uses a newsletter (digest) skin which can be customized– Notifiers

• Email and Jabber notifiers – notification of all new content, edits, label changes

• Extensible - add your own• Collect Content and Send

– Email – Users can select any set of content and mail out• Audit trail remembers who sent what to who, when

– PDF / WordML – Users can select any set of content and generate a PDF or WordML Briefing Book• Can automatically create an Appendix with N levels of referenced articles

• Traction Java SDK and SDL (Skin Definition Language)• Java SDK for extending SDL, Authentication and Directory, Notification, and Action

How are you addressing records management needs?

TeamPage maintains a deep audit trail of content edits, tags added or removed, items emailed (who emailed what), erasures and more. For each action: who, what, when.

Includes built-in WebDAV linear versioning for files attached to wiki pages / blog posts

Provides WebDAV web folders associated with each project or any wiki page or blog post.

TeamPage permission filters all views, including FAST search and drilldown navigation, RSS / Atom

NAC Fall 2007 Questions

How are you enabling enterprise mashups? Define enterprise mashup

Enterprise mashups = Web based views, widgets or services that combine, correlate and deliver information from services based on W3C standards.

TeamPage includes a plug-in extensible SDL (Skin Definition Language), SDK (Java class library with source) and support for creating text pattern as well as inline widgets and views over maps, videos, etc.

Text pattern example: Product code text pattern to live PLM link; UPS shipping code to UPS tracking page

NAC Fall 2007 Questions

What standards are important for Enterprise 2.0 ?

Web addressable views of new and legacy content stores make navigation and search scalable

RSS / Atom syndication feeds from new and legacy applications make notification scalable

Apply principals of global identity (authentication) and local permission consistently across web services

Perform all integration of information directly created, linked, tagged and searched by humans as high in the stack as possible

NAC Fall 2007 Questions

What steps should be taken in setting the collaboration strategy

of an organization? How to decide? Use the simplest possible web based standards to connect diverse communication, content, collaboration, portal and office applications

Behavior? Recognize that what people see and use on the public Web is driving expectations on what they expect for life at work. Take advantage of the shift in expectation to shift habits (like use of email) and deliver on expectations

Lifespan? The lifespan of web based collaboration technologies is much longer and more stable than any proprietary stack. Look to the Web.

NAC Fall 2007 Questions

Partner Integration Example – FAST

Automatic Entity and Keyword extraction and drill down provides context sensitive content navigation - over and above integrated search.

Search results and drill down navigation are permission filtered on the fly.

FAST Search and Content Navigation