I enjoy learning about weblog and wiki software that’s going to make a difference to organisations, and it looks like Traction Software certainly has something to offer, following my web-connected chat with Traction’s Jason Seigal. It’s a flexible, customisable weblog software that means that documents and discussions can be collaboratively worked on without the manual load of a wiki, but with much more flexibility than a standard blog.

“All information has structure. However, the structure is almost always dependent on the range of topics addressed within the information content and the other documents, emails, or conversations that are logically connected. Traction provides the power-tools to enable the user to provide this structure, in the course of communicating. Traction relies on projects, project specific labels and hyperlinks, instead of folder trees, to provide structure, as needed, and to allow dynamic change over time.”

Of course you can customise blog software to this end, but what I like about Traction is the thought that’s gone into making it user friendly.

“Projects: Traction is organized into secure, permissioned “project” spaces. Users are able to see all labels, comments and articles belonging to projects for which they have read rights. Traction uniquely allows a user to look at an article in one project with visible, contextual references to only those articles in other projects for which they have permission.”

You’d expect it to allow RSS feeds in & out which it does. But what I didn’t expect was the nimble use of comments, allowing participants to add comments after specific paragraphs, and the use of that comment logic to ensure that if content is deleted that action is recorded as if a comment.

“Users can enter comments at the paragraph or article level. Comments, like articles and labels, belong to specific projects and, therefore, can be made available to those readers who have rights to see them. The comment feature turns uncontrolled pan-organizational cc: email volleys into single-track, nested discussions that are readily capitalized as systemic knowledge assets.”

Of course why I approached Traction was their work already in using this software for shift handovers. Certainly in looking at its adoption for shift handover in hospitals I can see where it could play a positive part.