| Oracle® Collaboration Suite Concepts Release 2 (9.0.4) Part Number B15605-01 |
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View PDF |
| Oracle® Collaboration Suite Concepts Release 2 (9.0.4) Part Number B15605-01 |
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|
View PDF |
Until recently, business managers implementing systems for departmental messaging and collaboration have been forced to choose between fragmented applications from separate vendors, or collaborative products that did not meet their scalability, reliability, manageability, and data security concerns. The problem of dealing with large and scattered bulks of information over heterogeneous systems has been addressed with the recent introduction of collaborative systems. However, none of these collaborative systems have been built on a relational database.
Oracle has met the need for a secure and reliable enterprise-wide collaborative solution with Oracle Collaboration Suite, an integrated suite of applications that enables users to exchange e-mail, receive voicemails and faxes, organize their appointments, share documents, search for information, and arrange and conduct online meetings. Users can access these services over the Web, by fax, by voice, or over wireless networks by using phones and PDAs.
In short, Oracle Collaboration Suite:
Is the first and only collaboration system built on a relational database.
Replaces fragmented collaboration solutions that do not interact with each other.
Enables the exchange and sharing of everyday business data, such as e-mail, schedules, documents, telephone systems, and contact information.
Accesses all collaborative data through desktop applications, the Web, PDAs, and mobile phones.
Oracle Collaboration Suite uses Oracle Database to centralize and consolidate collaborative content, providing a secure, failure-tolerant, available and scalable infrastructure. Collaboration Suite provides a single application platform built on Oracle9i Application Server that integrates e-mail, voicemail, fax, calendar, files, search, and real-time collaboration services. Finally, with Oracle Collaboration Suite's interaction layer, employees get streamlined access through a common Web interface, standards-based desktop clients including Microsoft Outlook, wireless, fax and voice options.
Oracle Collaboration Suite is composed of several applications working together to provide a seamless collaborative solution. For example, Oracle Calendar enables users to schedule and join Oracle Web conferences directly through their calendars, and faxes sent to Oracle Collaboration Suite users arrive directly in their e-mail inbox.
Oracle Collaboration Suite includes the following components:
Oracle Calendar is the time management component of Oracle Collaboration Suite. Calendar combines group and resource scheduling functionality, along with a variety access methods, to give you up-to-date calendar information.
Calendar is also capable of free-time searches, multiple time zone support and UTF-8 encoding to support international deployments, e-mail and wireless alerts, multi-platform support and an extensible Authentication, Compression and Encryption (ACE) framework for enhanced security.
Related Documentation:
Oracle Calendar Administrator's Guide
Oracle Calendar Reference Manual
Oracle Email is the Oracle Collaboration Suite open standards based solution for enterprise-wide e-mail, voice mail and faxes. Oracle Email enables users of Oracle Collaboration Suite to access messages with any standards-based mail client. Messages can be accessed using any client compliant with IMAP4 (Internet Message Access Protocol) or POP3 (Post Office Protocol), such as Netscape Messenger, Microsoft Outlook Express, or Eudora Pro Lite. Oracle Email provides directory services using the Light-Weight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) standards-compliant Oracle Internet Directory.
Related Documentation for Oracle Email:
Oracle Email Administrator's Guide
Oracle Email Anti-Spam Configuration
Oracle Files is designed as an enterprise file server replacement, with added content management features (for example, versioning) that enable users to collaborate more efficiently. All content is stored in an Oracle database. Oracle Files provides:
Support for file-sharing and collaboration protocols
A Web user interface designed for large-scale deployments
Collaboration based on Workspaces
Content management features like extensible metadata, versioning, and content-based searching
Workflow integration for approval and routing
User and administrator options for single file recovery
Scalability, reliability, security, and platform independence
See the Oracle Files Administrator's Guide for more information about Oracle Files administration, configuration, and troubleshooting.
Oracle Ultra Search crawls multiple Oracle repositories and creates indexes that can be searched quickly. Ultra Search crawls and indexes relational databases, HTML documents hosted on Web servers, Oracle9iAS Portal, hard drives, IMAP mail servers and more.
See the Oracle Ultra Search User's Guide for more information about Oracle Ultra Search system requirements, installation instructions, configuration and troubleshooting information.
Oracle Voicemail & Fax is the scalable voice mail and fax component of Oracle Collaboration Suite. Oracle Voicemail & Fax provides Oracle Collaboration Suite with centralized and secure message storage and retrieval for voicemail and faxes. It enhances the traditional voicemail system and fax capabilities with improved scalability, reliability, and accessibility features including e-mail access to voice and fax messages. In addition, it provides telephone processing, message delivery, browser based clients, and administration utilities.
Oracle Voicemail & Fax is designed to coexist with legacy PBX systems, allowing you to migrate to the next generation of unified communication while leveraging the Oracle Collaboration Suite data infrastructure.
See the Oracle Voicemail & Fax Administrator's Guide for more information about Oracle Voicemail & Fax's system requirements, installation instructions, frequently asked questions and troubleshooting information.
Oracle Web Conferencing is the real-time conferencing component of Oracle Collaboration Suite. Oracle Web Conferencing lets employees, customers, and partners to meet, interact and collaborate with each other online in real time. Oracle Web Conferencing features multiple ways to collaborate in conferences, including desktop sharing, whiteboarding, chatting, polling and cobrowsing Web sites. It also supports all types of meetings that include:
Live help sessions
Interactive meetings
Web seminars
See the Oracle Web Conferencing Administrator's Guide or the Oracle Web Conferencing Troubleshooting Guide for more information on Oracle Web Conferencing.
Oracle9iAS Wireless enables you to access your e-mail, voice mail, calendar, address book, tasks, files, corporate directories, and instant messaging from any device with wireless or voice access. You can use your mobile phone, telephone, or any other wireless device, from anywhere, to:
Receive and answer your e-mail.
Send documents to a co-worker.
Look up the phone numbers of another employee in your corporate directory
In addition, you can be notified when:
Documents are updated in your folder.
Receive meeting reminders.
The Oracle9iAS Wireless functionality in Collaboration Suite is provided by the Oracle9iAS Wireless multimodal, which is a multichannel service delivery platform based on XML and J2EE standards.
See the Oracle9iAS Wireless Administrator's Guide for more information about Oracle Wireless system requirements, installation instructions, frequently asked questions and troubleshooting information.
The following are some of the most prominent benefits of using Oracle Collaboration Suite for all your enterprise-wide communication:
Oracle Collaboration Suite is a modular, three-tier collaboration solution. Although each layer of Oracle Collaboration Suite can be physically installed on the same machine, this deployment method would only meet the smallest enterprise's needs for security and availability. The architecture for larger enterprises typically features the distribution of the three tiers on different machines. This is the most efficient way to install Oracle Collaboration Suite since each tier has specific resource demands which can be deployed more efficiently on separate hardware. Oracle Collaboration Suite offers numerous deployment options that emphasize varying degrees of availability, scalability, security and scalability.
Related Documentation:
Oracle Collaboration Suite Deployment
Oracle Collaboration Suite Pre-Installation Requirements
Oracle Collaboration Suite Sizing and Performance Tuning
Oracle Collaboration Suite High Availability
Oracle Collaboration Suite includes a robust set of developer kits, Web services and APIs. The various SDKs can be used to enhance the functionality of your existing business applications.
Related Documentation:
Oracle Calendar Application Developer's Guide
Oracle Calendar SDK Java API Reference
Oracle Calendar Web Services Java API Reference
Oracle Email Application Developer's Guide
Oracle Email Java API Reference
Oracle Sync Server is also part of the Oracle Collaboration Suite product portfolio. Sync Server delivers remote synchronization of calendar and contact data with any SyncML-enabled device or application. Oracle Sync Server offers direct two-way synchronization with the Oracle Calendar server over any standard Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) connection, opening up the calendar infrastructure to any SyncML-compliant device or application with Internet access. The Oracle Sync Server architecture can also be extended to support third-party standards-based or proprietary infrastructures.
See the Oracle Calendar Resource Kit and the Oracle Sync Server online help for more information about Oracle Sync Server.
Oracle Collaboration Suite is built on top of Oracle9iAS and Oracle9i Database, providing the same level of security associated with each of these Oracle products.
In addition, the architecture of Oracle Collaboration Suite enables your IT department to setup multiple security zones. Typically, this consists of an intranet, a de-militarized zone (DMZ), and networks external to the intranet and DMZ, including the Internet. For enhanced security, each zone is separated by firewalls configured to monitor each other. If one firewall fails, another takes over its duties.
See Oracle Collaboration Suite SSL Configuration and Oracle Collaboration Suit Firewall and Load Balancer Architecture for more information about SSL and firewalls as they relate to Oracle Collaboration Suite.
Oracle Collaboration Suite can be deployed on multiple platforms. The following operating systems are supported by Oracle Collaboration Suite:
Linux
Microsoft Windows
HP-UX 11.0
Solaris
IBM AIX
Compaq Tru64
Although Oracle Collaboration Suite provides solutions for each collaborative need, it was also designed with interoperability in mind. Oracle Collaboration Suite can extend current collaboration systems or replace them completely. Components of Oracle Collaboration Suite can be installed incrementally in order to replace existing collaboration solutions over a longer time period, easing the transition to a next generation collaboration system.
See Oracle Collaboration Suite Integration with Microsoft Active Directory for an example of Oracle Collaboration Suite's interoperability with other vendors.
