Traction® Software, the leading developer of Enterprise 2.0 social software, announced the release of Traction TeamPage 4.1 and new plug-ins for content ratings and user activity metrics. TeamPage 4.1 breaks new ground by making it easy to analyze user activity and rate TeamPage blog posts, comments or wiki pages to highlight and act on important information. These capabilities support “wiki gardeners” and help identify best practices or patterns that can build a stronger community and improve the content it creates.

“Ever since we made it possible for groups to communicate and collaborate by easily posting, editing and tagging pages, we’ve sought new ways to improve, enrich and leverage information in the course of doing everyday work,” said Greg Lloyd, president and CEO of Traction Software. “The new ratings and metrics plug-ins satisfy this goal by providing just the right mix of explicit ratings tools and implicit metrics tools to get the job done. They help the community gather quick and easy insight into what’s important now, and over all time.”

Traction TeamPage 4.1 Extends “Live Blog” Technology to Document Sharing

TeamPage 4.1 introduces a new document management interface so users can get a “live” view of what’s going on in a Document Share Folder, signaling in real-time as documents are added, removed, and checked-in or out. This new interface incorporates the same rapid AJAX technology used in Traction Software’s Live Blog micro-messaging plug-in, supporting twitter style micro-messaging that feels as interactive as live instant messaging.

New Content Rating Plug-in: 5-Star and Thumbs Up Rating Scales

With the new Ratings plug-in, workspace owners can enable one of two different rating methods. The 5-Star method enables you to highlight the average rating of ideas and product requirements. The “Thumbs up” (or “vote to promote”) method highlights the number of people who found a particular item to be interesting or useful.

Section panels on the Traction Front Page and in each workspace offer each person a permission filtered dashboard view of top rated content over the last 24 hours, 7 days or all time.

New Metrics Plug-In Tracks and Reports On User Activity, Exposes Best Practice

TeamPage’s new Metrics plug-in generates reports to allow members and managers to track and assess Traction workspace activity.

Users can now see what workspaces and which specific articles are read the most, and get their own view of top articles and comments by day, by week or over all time. For each article, the Metrics plug-in shows who read it and offers a link to the reader’s profile.

Metrics reports also offer deep insight into the collaborative process. While frequent authors are easy to spot, Metrics highlight key collaborators or “wiki gardeners,” who often work beneath the surface, improving content by editing, commenting and tagging. Reports also chart tags that are read or used the most, to help identify best practices and patterns that can be extended across workspaces.

Metrics and Ratings Plug-Ins Demonstrate Platform Extensibility

The new metrics and ratings capabilities are packaged as plug-ins, demonstrating the extensibility of the Traction platform. The plug-ins use the Traction SDK and SDL (Skin Definition Language), leveraging a pluggable database to store and query relational content including ratings and activity tracking.

Forrester Research has published a new report on the state of wikis, blogs, social networking, and other new tools in the enterprise: Forrester TechRadar™ For Information & Knowledge Management Pros: Enterprise Web 2.0.

No longer new, Web 2.0 technologies solve problems that enterprises have today - but most have not yet used these tools to anywhere near their potential. Waiting for tools to mature seems prudent, but if you wait too long, employees may create their own collaborative environments on the Web. Timing your next move requires you to track the maturity of enterprise Web 2.0 technologies. In a careful examination of the marketplace and trends for enterprise Web 2.0 tools, we reveal that organizations find wikis valuable, forums stable (though underutilized), and report mixed success with blogs. Enterprise social networking tools stand ready to redefine workplace collaboration, adding new value to your organization’s content by associating it with peers and experts.

For more on this, check out the teleconference Forrester hosted on Monday with two of the report’s authors, analysts Gil Yehuda and Oliver Young.

Via Grow Your Wiki.

Via Webilus.