Oracle’s Beehive: Getting Honey from the Hive

Results are Achieved when People Work Together

In order to achieve even the most basic of business goals, everyone in an organization collaborates in some way. Enterprise Collaboration requires people to coordinate and communicate around an activity at hand and requires different tools depending on the phase of the activity.

An example can be a team of knowledge workers (Engineers, Architects, etc) working on a proposal. At certain points in time, they need to be able to communicate the proposal amongst each other or to coordinate their milestones for this project. Throughout the whole process, experts on various aspects of the projects need to communicate their ideas and provide feedback. Teams need tools that allow them to effectively work together, to see and use the contributions of other team members, and to track the tasks associated with achieving the team’s goals.

Oracle Beehive is Oracle’s newest software platform for enterprise collaboration. Beehive provides collaborative tools built around a unified collaborative model allowing team members to work together and accomplish their goals. These tools help teams to collaborate efficiently across multiple geographies and organizations with:
• Group scheduling and calendaring with resource management and direct access to team members’ corporate calendars.
• Team task management with assignments and reporting.
• Team member communication via e-mail, voicemail and instant messaging.
• Discussions capabilities that allow long running conversations on any document or subject.
• Voice and Web Conferencing from various clients
• Basic collaborative data management capabilities with check-in/check-out, versioning and locking functionality.
• Workflow and notification capabilities that allow users to determine when and how they want to be notified of activities.
• Team and organizational directories that expose presence and make it easy to contact team members.

According to Oracle, Beehive is the only unified collaboration platform designed specifically for the enterprise. Oracle Beehive allows IT to standardize on a single collaboration platform incorporating the full range of collaboration and communications services. It is based on a centralized deployment that allows unmatched scalability, manageability, and integration with critical enterprise applications and infrastructure. Using Oracle Beehive, enterprises can centrally provision, manage, securely audit, and globally apply compliance rules to all users and teams at the workgroup, departmental or enterprise level. Oracle Beehive offers the lowest total cost of ownership, and delivers significant customer value either installed alongside existing messaging infrastructure or in place of it. Oracle Beehive offers customers both on-premise and on-demand deployment options.

What’s so special about Beehive?

Beehive Object Model
The Beehive Object Model (BOM) is an all-inclusive notion of collaborative objects, artifacts, and users, and the bonds between the objects. The BOM embodies the unique vision of Oracle Beehive – a unified collaboration platform –, which includes management of collaborative artifacts regardless of type, a single notion of groups, links between artifacts and common access control.

Collaboration within Business Processes
With Oracle Beehive, collaboration can be embedded directly into business processes. This is achieved through a variety of services such as: standard protocols, Oracle Beehive’s event-driven architecture, BPEL workflows and Web Services. These services can also be embedded within portals or into composite applications. Using Oracle Beehive's Event Driven Platform, users can create customizable policies for data and processes, automate collaboration in business processes, and integrate with external systems and applications through Oracle BPEL Process Manager on over 400+ events.

Tracking Context
Often it is not the actual content that is useful, but rather it is the related information such as the author or the connection to a related object. A user searching for a specific document is often more interested in knowing the author of the document than she was the document itself. Oracle Beehive maintains this bond between the document and the author regardless of later use.

Keeping Contextual Relationships
Oracle Beehive allows users to efficiently search across all artifacts, regardless of type and context. Tags can be applied to all artifacts for easy retrieval later across a workspace or multiple workspaces. Enterprise taxonomies can be defined and their application enforced based on the policy definition for a specific workspace or folder. These capabilities augment the traditional folder structures, providing alternative navigation paths to discover managed collaborative content.

Try some Honey today – We have a new Oracle Beehive Demo we’d love to show you. Register to attend the upcoming Webinar or give us call to learn more about Beehive.