Traction Software, Inc. is a software company headquartered in

Providence, RI Providence is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Rhode Island. One of the oldest cities in New England, it was founded in 1636 by Roger Williams, a Reformed Baptist theologian and religious exile from the Massachusetts Bay ...

. It is the creator of

Traction TeamPage Traction TeamPage is a proprietary enterprise 2.0 social software product developed by Traction Software Inc. of Providence, Rhode Island. TeamPage is one of the first products in the enterprise blog and wiki market, with Traction release 1.0 sh ...

software for action tracking and collaboration. Traction Software products are used as

project management software Project management software (PMS) has the capacity to help plan, organize, and manage resource tools and develop resource estimates. Depending on the sophistication of the software, it can manage estimation and planning, scheduling, cost control an ...

quality management Quality management ensures that an organization, product or service consistently functions well. It has four main components: quality planning, quality assurance, quality control and quality improvement. Quality management is focused not only ...

software,

knowledge management software Knowledge management software (KM software) is a subset of enterprise content management software, which contains a range of software that specializes in the way information is collected, stored and/or accessed. The concept of knowledge management ...

competitive intelligence Competitive intelligence (CI) is the process and forward-looking practices used in producing knowledge about the competitive environment to improve organizational performance. It involves the systematic collection and analysis of information from ...

software, as well as other

collaborative software Collaborative software or groupware is application software designed to help people working on a common task to attain their goals. One of the earliest definitions of groupware is "intentional group processes plus software to support them". As re ...

applications.

History

The company was founded in 1996 by Chris Nuzum and Gregory Lloyd who were heavily influenced by the work of

Douglas Engelbart Douglas Carl Engelbart (January 30, 1925 – July 2, 2013) was an American engineer and inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on founding the field of human–computer interaction, particularly ...

On-Line System NLS, or the "oN-Line System", was a revolutionary computer collaboration system developed in the 1960s. Designed by Douglas Engelbart and implemented by researchers at the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (S ...

(the first hypertext journaling system) and other hypertext pioneers including

Andy van Dam Andries "Andy" van Dam (born December 8, 1938) is a Dutch-American professor of computer science and former vice-president for research at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Together with Ted Nelson he contributed to the first hyper ...

's HES and

Ted Nelson Theodor Holm Nelson (born June 17, 1937) is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher, and sociologist. He coined the terms ''hypertext'' and ''hypermedia'' in 1963 and published them in 1965. Nelson coined the terms ''transcl ...

's Xanadu. The company was first to the

Enterprise 2.0 Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory) web and social web) refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, and ...

software market with releases dating back to 1999 and a commercial market launch in 2002 when

Version 2.8 was the first platform to be called an Enterprise Weblog in a review by Jon Udell of InfoWorld. In 2003, the US Department of Defense CIO office funded a Rapid Acquisition Incentive-Net Centricity (RAI-NC) pilot program, titled the "Liberty Project," to study the business case for using social software for net-centric project communication and information management. The study involved funding to add the

WebDAV WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which allows user agents to collaboratively author contents ''directly'' in an HTTP web server by providing facilities for concu ...

extension to the Traction platform and to support the following Liberty Project participants: Traction Software, The Office of Naval Research, the Army Night Vision Lab, Defense Acquisition University, Naval Underwater Warfare Center, Marine Corps, Ford Motor Company, and the New York City Police. Traction Software was named to KMWorld’s 100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management for nine consecutive years through 2013. In the Competitive Intelligence market,

was included in Fuld & Company Intelligence Software Report in 2008/2009, 2006/2007, and 2004/2005.

Funding

The company was initially funded by

In-Q-Tel In-Q-Tel (IQT), formerly Peleus and In-Q-It, is an American not-for-profit venture capital firm based in Arlington, Virginia. It invests in high-tech companies to keep the Central Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies, equipped with ...

(the venture arm of the US Central Intelligence Agency) in May 2000. In-Q-Tel followed through in June 2002 with a customer agreement that represents the first significant enterprise site license of a blogging platform. Traction Software raised a second round in 2002 with participation from In-Q-Tel, the Slater Fund,Slater Fund
and private investors.

Products

Traction Software's primary product is

. TeamPage options include:
* TeamPage Cloud Option - Managed AWS TeamPage cloud instance includes daily backups, software updates, Solr search, AWS security and encryption. * TeamPage Azure AD Cloud option - Microsoft Azure AD provides cloud-based identity and access management services to both cloud and on-premises resources * TeamPage Quality Management Solution - Provides TeamPage based core Quality Management Documentation, Tracking, and Reporting services

References

{{Reflist Software companies based in Rhode Island Software companies of the United States