One of the major announcements during Charles Philips’ keynote: Oracle Beehive: integrated and secure collaboration platform.The successor to Oracle Collaboration Suite.Targeted at Enterprise Collaboration. And allegedly ‘built from scratch in 3 years’. The demo showed the Outlook Client running against the Beehive server. And not Outlook as we know it – Outlook extended with many collaboration features. Access to Workspaces in which teams collaborate on documents, presentations etc. In a workspace, members have access to joint resources, on line communication (IM/Chat) and on line conferencing. The demo included two clients working in a virtual collaborarion environment – jointly developing a Powerpoint presentation, both making changes. The Beehive software ensure bi-directional synchronization – changes on one client are rapidly synchronized among all members in the workspace. It looks cool!

However, at some point in time, Oracle Mail, Oracle Office, Oracle InterOffice and Oracle Collaboration Suite looked cool too. And neither of them was very successful in the market. What makes Beehive different? …. (more…)