Oracle has unveiled Oracle Beehive to help organisations
secure communications and add collaboration into business
processes.
A comprehensive open-standards based enterprise collaboration
platform, Oracle Beehive delivers integrated team workspaces,
calendar, instant messaging and e-mail to users.
By using a unified object model and taking advantage of the
security capabilities in the Oracle Database, Oracle Beehive
provides a centralised, secure and auditable collaboration
platform, that helps organisations reduce the cost and complexity
of regulatory compliance and legal discovery, said Oracle.
Oracle Beehive's integrated services and open hot-pluggable
architecture enable organisations to embed collaboration directly
into existing business applications and processes.
As a result, users can invoke Oracle Beehive's collaboration
services from within applications and a broad range of client
interfaces.
Oracle Beehive helps extend IT investments and simplify
administration by leveraging existing infrastructure, such as
standards-based authentication, role-based access control, and
privacy tools.
Oracle Beehive software is now available, with software licenses
from around £60 per user.
David Mitchell, an analyst at Ovum, said, "Oracle Collaboration
Suite was not widely adopted in the market, with Oracle finding
difficulties in persuading customers to adopt the technology.
"Beehive, with its much improved functionality, architecture and
user-interaction models, has the potential to change that
pattern."
He said, "Beehive offers facilities for team workspaces,
messaging, e-mail, calendar management, instant messaging,
presence, task management, document management, web/voice
conferencing, mobile access and voicemail. These are the key areas
of functionality that would be expected in a modern collaboration
platform."