Yes agree about the need for a suite of products, at this stage of my blogging that’s implied. Blogs, wikis, microblogging all have their niche functions. But why I like microblogging is that it reminds of email if it were to be connected and open…one window to post everything.

I have only seen a fraction of what traction can do…sounds great.

Check out my new post on more about microblogging on task work http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2010/07/19/enterprise-microblogging-you-no-longer-have-to-report-back-to-base/

Enterprise microblogging can’t be a full solution either, inasmuch as Twitter can’t. Twitter is part of an ecosystem including blogs, wikis, web search, news and other web resources.

So, deploying enterprise microblogging on its own in hopes of solving any problems would be fairly short sited. As in TeamPage (www.tractionsoftware.com) You need a whole platform (or set of platforms) capable of supporting the full range range of publishing, editing, tagging, search and notification requirements. Each of the publishing facilities (blog, microblog, wiki, comment) chip away at email - hopefully leaving it as a place for notification, a client for publishing and a decent tool to communicate with folks with whom you will only have incidental contact or no common “place” to go.

As for the feature requirements / requests — It’s nice that the microblogging style encourages short burst exchanges but (as you argue) by no means should require it. Unlimited size, ability to put in attachments, ability to tag, ability to monitor a thread or a tag, ability to edit are all teampage features accessible when you go into the single entry view of a live-blog post. While outside the norm: occasional access to the full range of features in the platform, as they relate to a given live blog entry, is a vital capability and that integration also means that the micro-blog entries can participate in the rest of the information eco-system.

Thx Mike,

Took a look at MangoSpring..very impressive.

Yes adding to a Watchlist is what I’m after which I have seen on a few products. Took a look at some of your other features which are of interest:

- Read reciept
- Move item to a group or project
http://www.mangospring.com/w/work/mangospring-releases-new-web-client/
- Add as task (employees can assign tasks and follow…don’t need a status report

I’m going to blog about this last one about not needing to communicate an explicit progress update as it’s an observable artifact in the activity flow
..it ties in with a comment Paula Thornton (rotkapchen) made on this post in relation to artifacts http://twurl.nl/1ld5qi

My head hurts, though, when I think about getting everyone on a team to use this type of functionality. There’s always someone for whom emailing attachments and “catching up once a day” is the extent to which collaborative systems will be used. Convincing such folks — some of whom write the checks for this stuff — to think about the parsing and tracking of “conversations” at a more atomic and granular level will be a challenge.

And don’t get me started on demographics. Suffice it to say that’s it’s not just old folks that are curmudgeons about adopting this type of functionality.

Which gets us back to “transition” and “change management” topics. It could be that what would make the most sense is just making a clean sweep like, “If you’re going to work here/on this project/in this group you HAVE to use this system, and that’s it. No exceptions”