Last week I was speaking with Jordan Frank from Traction Software about security in collaboration platforms. The Traction team have done a fantastic job building security in from the ground up, and the level of configuration is fantastic. If you are in the market for a collaboration platform, check out what they are offering.

There was one thing during my talk with Jordan that really stood out, and that was paragraph-level security. So here’s the big idea: you have a wiki page, which a customer creates to share feedback on product installation, and to raise some red flags that they experienced. If the system you are using doesn’t support paragraph-level security (or access), then any discussions about that feedback will have to occur somewhere else. In other words, you will be forced to have duplication and diffusion of information about those red flags across more than one system:

• The system the customer commented in will have the master feedback from the customer, plus the “official” response from the vendor, as in “Thank you for your feedback; we’ll get back to you”; and
• The system the vendor’s people work in to discuss and address the problem, and then signal that the “official” response is ready to be updated.

Such diffusion is bound to lead to someone getting their wires crossed, and things getting dropped. But with TeamPage, due to paragraph-level security, the vendor’s staff can comment directly on the page … when the customer looks at it, they see the paragraph elements they are permitted to see, and nothing else. But when the vendor’s staff look at the page, they see the complete conversation and discussion history.

Have a look at the following two screenshots: in the first, the customer is only permitted to see what they wrote and the official response:

But in the second, it’s the same page, but the reader is permitted to see more:

I think that rocks!

Do the systems you use for collaboration on a daily basis support this type of work flow?