Friday, April 16, 2010

Collaborative Technologies

Intelligent Collaboration: Getting to the Honey

Collaborative technologies help redefine teamwork, leadership, and the concept of collective intelligence. Do you even know who might have the expertise within your company for the issue you face?

In order to achieve even the most basic of business goals, everyone in an organization collaborates in some way. Intelligent Collaboration requires getting to the right people in your enterprise to facilitate, 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 for example) working on a proposal. 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. 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.

Oracle Beehive Release 2 is Oracle’s newest software platform for enterprise collaboration. 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. 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.


What’s so special about Beehive?

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.

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.

Scott Jenkins
Managing Director
The EBS Group
http://www.theEBSgroup.com