Roland Tanglao liked my review of Traction , but reconsidered when Jim McGee pointed out that Traction is a whole lot more expensive:
What more do you get than buying individual licenses for Radio which you can get for about 1/10 the cost of Traction? [ McGee's Musings ]
Traction is for power users in the enterprise. Some things those users get, right out of the box:
- integrated search, both fulltext and structured
- email in (with support for attachments), email digests out
- deep referential integrity, with bidirectional linking
- rss feeds based on arbitrary queries
- flexible categorization, with multiple terms available at both document and paragraph level
- an advanced "blog this" tool that captures email, web, and Word docs with high fidelity
- a security system based on users and projects
There was not an opportunity in the review to put Traction and Radio into a wider context, so I'll do that here. Radio is a fabulous KM enabler. Obviously I use it every day for that purpose, and I highly recommend it. It is also, indisputably, a great bargain. Traction aims to serve power users, in enterprises that will pay for things that Radio could surely be configured to do, but doesn't do out of the box.
The two are highly complementary. A core team of power K-loggers could use Traction for its advanced features, while integrating (via RSS) with a larger group of Radio users. I am, in fact, considering just such an architecture. The XML support in both products ensures that they can work well with each other, and with other things too. Like the Perl guys say: There Is More Than One Way To Do It. And like Sam Ruby says: "As long as it is interoperable, I am happy."
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/07/19.html#a345