The Traction Workgroup Portal greatly boosts a team's
productivity by creating a "workgroup-centric" web site
from a concise record of the team’s own actions. A simple
Newspage view makes getting project information as easy
as scanning a newspaper. Compare Traction7407, Traction7339, Traction6839
Unlike corporate or commercial portals, Traction
focuses on news, events, and resources collected by
members of the team using familiar office applications.
Because the content is tightly focused, the Traction
Workgroup Portal becomes a specific and valuable source
of news and information you can control and rely on –
searchable from your desktop, laptop, or wireless PDA –
any place you can use email or a browser.
Traction uses a timeline to collect information for its
Newspage view. It’s easy to focus on what’s happening
today, this week or this month – and flip to previous
periods only when you want to do research or bring
someone up to speed.
Traction creates concise topical views showing paragraphs
that you have flagged. It’s like skimming a newspaper
or briefing book that collects what’s important and on
point. Threaded discussions all too often read like
talk show transcripts, and make it impossible to flag
the key points for review or followup.
The Traction server works by processing messages
and attached files to create a knowledgebase that is
accessible as a Web site. Traction stores, classifies,
and cross-references the content of the messages for
easy reference, creating live links to attachments,
URLs and related messages. One message to Traction
makes it available to the entire team, cutting email
overload and frustration.
Traction's built-in XML parser allows it to channel XML
tagged information from news services directly into the
appropriate section of your Newspage. Traction can also
log and tag news, significant events and notification
messages sent from corporate information systems in order
to alert workgroup members when significant events occur.
Authorized individuals can use email, standard Web browsers or
Microsoft Outlook 2000 to add to the Newspage view of
current information. Because the Traction Workgroup
Portal builds on email, web browsing and newspaper
reading skills, it is easy for people to incorporate
Traction into their daily work habits. Team members can
track and resolve issues that fall outside normal workflow
while easily including references to business transactions,
earlier messages and materials on an Intranet or on the
public Internet.
Unlike email archives, newsgroups, and threaded discussion
databases, messages sent to the Traction server become
part of a living knowledge base that can be updated and
enhanced. The Traction Workgroup Portal maintains a
complete audit trail on items added, updated and
reclassified, so that workgroup members can find and
reuse the information in past messages and archived
files. Project leaders, and authorized team members,
can further organize the stored information, adding
cross-references and creating summaries with links to
relevant information for bringing new team members up
to speed.
The Traction server can be installed and configured in
minutes on any computer running a Java-compliant
operating system, including Windows 95, 98 and NT 4.0,
Sun Solaris, Mac OS, Linux and other Unix versions.
Although no special client tools or browser plug-ins
are required to use the Traction Workgroup Portal,
Twisted Systems will be providing a set of Microsoft
Outlook 2000 templates and extensions for customers who
wish to deploy a portal that is ideal for use by an
Office 2000 workgroup.