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Oracle® Beehive Concepts
Release 1 (1.4)

Part Number E13794-02
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3 Oracle Beehive Services

This module provides an overview of the services provided by Oracle Beehive, and contains the following topics:

Overview of Oracle Beehive Services

Oracle Beehive offers discrete, function-specific services that interoperate seamlessly to provide a wide range of features for enterprise collaboration, compliance, third-party component connectivity, coexistence, user and system administration, and security. The services-oriented design of the system enables administrators to start and stop services as well as service instances.

This section provides a general overview of Oracle Beehive services, and includes the following topics:

Difference Between a Service and a Service Instance

In Oracle Beehive, the term service instance refers to a single instantiation of a service on a particular server. The term service typically refers to the collection of all instances of a particular service across all of the servers that host them.

You can control services at both the service and service instance levels. For example, you can start and stop a single instance of a service (the service instance) or all instances of a service (the service). Note, in cases where only one instance of a service exists in an Oracle Beehive deployment, you, in effect, manage both the service and the service instance concurrently.

Types of Services Provided by Oracle Beehive

Oracle Beehive provides the following types of services:

  • Core Services: Core Services perform fundamental system functions such as user management and authentication.

  • Collaboration Services: Collaboration Services provide collaboration-specific functionality that is leveraged by teams and individuals, including e-mail, time management, and instant messaging.

  • Enterprise Services: Enterprise Services provide functionality that is leveraged across the enterprise such as workspaces, mobile connectivity, event subscriptions and notifications, and search.

  • Platform Services: Platform Services enable organizations to integrate Oracle Beehive with existing environments and third-party components, and customize the platform to suit their needs.

How Oracle Beehive Services Leverage Each Other

Oracle Beehive is built so that its services can leverage the platform and each other in a way that insulates each service from the implementation details of the others. For example, users can be maintained in Oracle Internet Directory, but the Instant Message Service doesn't need to be aware of this because the User Directory Service provides the required abstraction. Similarly, calendar information can be maintained in Microsoft Exchange Server, with only the Time Management Service having the configured awareness because it provides the required abstraction for that information. This approach also allows for the modular development and deployment of services.

How Oracle Beehive Services are Exposed to Users

The features and functions of some services are exposed visually to users through supported Oracle Beehive clients and devices, while others operate in the background supporting key integrations, workflows, and low-level roles within the system. For example, most features of the E-mail Service, the Time Management Service, and the Instant Messaging Service are exposed visually to users in workspaces, while features of the Authentication Service, the Policy Service, and the User Directory Service are not exposed as explicitly.

Also, the features and data of some services are exposed through other services. For example, the features of the Presence Service, which detects and displays to others a user's current availability, are exposed through the Instant Messaging Service. Through the Instant Messaging Service, the Presence Service displays whether or not a user is currently available, and it may also provide additional user-configured details such as the user's contact information, preferred method of communication, or current location.

Similarly, Presence Service-based data can originate from other services. For example, when a user attends a scheduled meeting, the Time Management Service can notify the Presence Service of this. The Presence Service can then expose that information through the Instant Messaging Service, and so forth.

Core Services

Core Services perform fundamental system functions such as user management and authentication. Core Services are essential to Oracle Beehive, that is, they enable the operational functioning and management of the system.

Oracle Beehive provides the following Core Services:

Access Control Service

The Access Control Service supports and manages all aspects of user access to Oracle Beehive entities, including granting, restricting, and denying access. The Access Control Service provides its features and functions through a variety of mechanisms such as access control lists (ACLs), roles, privileges, and inheritance.

System administrators can define access control rules at the role, group, and user levels, and can include such privileges as create, read, update, and delete. Custom access control parameters, definitions, and rules are also supported.

In Oracle Beehive, access control is based on an authenticated user's identity, as well as the entity or operation being requested. For example, system administrators have full access and privileges for most system entities, whereas users typically only have the similar rights for the entities that they own or that are owned by the groups and workspaces to which they are members.

Audit Service

The Audit Service is the service interface to the Oracle Beehive Audit Framework, which supports and manages all aspects of auditing for system and business events.

Authentication Services

The Authentication Services manage all aspects of user authentication for Oracle Beehive, including single sign-on (SSO), user repository authentication, authentication policies, and encryption. The Authentication Services leverage the components and protocols that support Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS) and Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL). Client-specific authentication libraries can be supported as well.

The Authentication Services include the following services:

Authentication Service

The Authentication Service manages and supports a variety of authentication providers, including local authentication providers, existing LDAP servers, native Windows authentication providers, and Web-based SSO providers. The Authentication Service enables administrators to configure authentication modes. It also provides the following user-based authentication features:

  • Session timeout

  • Account lockout on repeated authentication failures

  • Password modification, such as changing and resetting passwords

  • Automatic login

Components and technologies supported by the Authentication Service include:

  • Oracle Database

  • Oracle Internet Directory (OID)

  • Oracle Single Sign-On (OSSO)

  • IBM Tivoli

  • Microsoft Active Directory

  • OpenLDAP Directory Server

  • Sun Java System Directory Server

Identity Provider Service

The Identity Provider Service provides certificate authority features for Oracle Beehive, enabling the system to manage digital certificates and other related security credentials.

Client Management Service

The Client Management Service enables administrators to manage client software settings related to client connections, notification thresholds, and debugging.

The Client Management Service enables administrators to:

  • Set session timeout values

  • Enable trace logs and debug mode

  • Set the node address on which to listen for incoming client requests

  • Set the maximum number of pending notifications that the Client Management Service will hold for supported clients

  • Suspend the threshold for the client notifications queue

Device Management Service

The Device Management Service enables system administrators to manage supported client software installed on computers, such as Oracle Beehive Integration for Outlook, and mobile devices.

Key features provided by the Device Management Service include:

  • Upload new client versions, paths, and property files

  • Search and list client versions

  • Delete client versions and patches

  • Specify target versions of clients for user groups

  • Edit client properties

  • Export client property files

  • Manage cross-platform client applications, including versions, patches, and modules

  • Define installable clients applications

  • Upgrade, download, and enable client applications

  • Execute remote commands such as data wipes, and requests for configuration information and client-side logs

  • Manage device-based profiles and configurations

Event Services

The Event Services are the service interfaces to the Oracle Beehive Event Framework, and include the following:

Events Service

The Events Service manages business events and related configuration settings, including:

  • Handles requests from the Subscription Service regarding subscriptions on business events

  • The log level for business events processing

  • The number of times the system should retry failed actions that result from business events

Object Event Publisher Service

The Object Event Publisher Service handles the notification logic for object-level events in Oracle Beehive.

Management Service

The Management Service enables administrators to manage a variety of aspects of the system through both Oracle Beekeeper and the command line utility (beectl), including scripting support for automated administration.

Administrative functions supported by the Management Service include:

  • On-the-fly system and infrastructure configuration (host names, ports, connections, memory, and so on) and management (start, stop, refresh, and restart)

  • Real-time usage and performance monitoring

  • Trace parameter configuration, including attaching probes to transactions

  • Identifying and examining errors in transactions

  • Linking trace errors to log records

  • Log level management

  • Log file management including rotation and disposition functions (parameter and qualifier definitions)

  • Log file repository management, including size management and truncation schedules

  • Input file consumption, allowing more complex tasks and configuration without repetitive commands

  • Integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control, providing familiar administrative operations for root cause analysis, dashboards, baselining, and trending

  • Remote monitoring through integration with existing Oracle and third-party system management tools and standardized protocols

Policy Service

The Policy Service enables organizations to centrally apply, manage, and store business logic for Oracle Beehive events. Administrators can create and apply policies in Oracle Beehive for a variety of business needs, including:

  • To facilitate business processes in collaborative activities.

  • To enforce business process and compliance requirements.

  • To reduce system administration time and effort.

A policy is a set of server-side rules that defines what actions the system must take when one or more events occur. Policies can apply to any Oracle Beehive entity, including users, artifacts, services, and workspaces. Out of the box, the Policy Service provides functional policies that enforce defined logic on password creation, user provisioning and deprovisioning, and auditing.

Administrators with the appropriate privileges can view, create, enable, disable, update, and delete policies through the Oracle Beehive beectl utility. Administrators can also export policy definitions as XML files.

The Policy Service leverages the Oracle Beehive Event Framework, facilitating policy delegation for other services, and also provides the following key features:

  • Policy and policy schema extensibility.

  • An inheritance model that supports enterprise-level policies with exceptions and extensions for specified groups, levels, and entities.

  • Policy templates that enable organizations to define the extensible characteristics of policies and the business rules that they contain.

Presence Service

The Presence Service supports and manages all aspects of user and resource presence for Oracle Beehive. Presence is the ability to detect and identify the status of a user or resource, and then display that status to other users and resources in one or more clients or applications. In other words, presence determines whether or not a user is or will be online and available, and, if so, to what capacity and in what location. Oracle Beehive provides a rich presence model that is exposed to users through supported clients and, most notably, through the Instant Message Services, although this model goes beyond the basic presence capabilities typically associated with instant messaging applications.

With the Presence Service, users can set their current statuses manually in supported clients or have Oracle Beehive automatically determine and display their statuses for them. For example, Oracle Beehive can automatically change a user's status to "In a Meeting" when a meeting is scheduled to start and "Available" when the meeting is scheduled to end. Once set, other users will know whether a user is available, away (temporarily), or should not be disturbed, among other conditions.

Oracle Beehive supports presence settings that specify a user's current activity, such as attending a meeting, engaged in a personal activity, or the time of last input. Users can customize their presence settings and can also specify multiple presence sources, such as computers, applications, phones, and mobile devices.

The Presence Service is based on the Rich Presence Information Data (RPID) format. Developers can customize, integrate with, and extend the Presence Service through the Oracle Beehive API. Developers can also customize data provided by the Presence Service, such as status messages for users.

User Directory Service

This section discusses the User Directory Service, which provides comprehensive user and group management capabilities for Oracle Beehive. This section is divided into the following topics:

Overview of the User Directory Service

The User Directory Service manages all aspects of user directory management for Oracle Beehive and supports a variety of implementations including local storage of users and groups as well as integrations with existing Oracle and third-party user directories.

The User Directory Service enables Oracle Beehive administrators to intuitively manage users and groups, including the ability to add, modify, and delete them. The User Directory Service supports the Beehive Directory (either natively or through coexistence with external directories). It also enables static and dynamic group memberships that are based on integrations with query-based groups defined in external directories.

Features Provided by the User Directory Service

Key user directory management features provided by the User Directory Service include:

  • Native user directory capabilities

  • Optional integration with supported Oracle and third-party user directory servers

    Note:

    For the list of supported user directory servers, please refer to "User Directory Servers Supported by the User Directory Service".
  • Support for static and dynamic group memberships

  • Contact management features such as address books and people lists

    Note:

    For more information, please refer to "Contact Management Features Supported by the User Directory Service".
  • Support for National Language Support (NLS) user aliases

  • Customizable user attribute fields

  • Attribute mapping with existing user directories

  • User creation through pre-defined templates

  • Import capabilities of directory data based on Extensible Markup Language (XML) files

  • Bulk user management functions including create, delete, and modify users

Oracle Beehive provides additional user directory management features, including:

  • Automatic addition of managers, direct reports, and peers to People lists

  • Ability to store and retrieve large-valued properties for contacts, such as file attachments and descriptions

User Directory Servers Supported by the User Directory Service

The User Directory Service supports integration with the following user directory servers:

  • Oracle Internet Directory

  • IBM Tivoli

  • Microsoft Active Directory

  • OpenLDAP Directory Server

  • Sun Java System Directory Server

Contact Management Features Supported by the User Directory Service

The User Directory Service supports and manages all aspects of contact management for Oracle Beehive users in the form of address books and people lists. In Oracle Beehive, a contact is a person or group with which users can interact. For each contact, Oracle Beehive supports a variety of information such as the contact's name, alias, job title, phone number, address, e-mail address, and photo. Oracle Beehive also supports large-valued properties for contacts, such as file attachments and descriptions.

The User Directory Service provides the following address book types:

  • Directory: The collection of all the groups and contacts within an enterprise, typically based on the organization's complete user directory.

  • Workspace: A collection of groups and contacts that are specific to a workspace. Each workspace can have one or more workspace address books. The contacts in workspace address books may be shared with other workspaces and users.

  • Personal: A collection of groups and contacts that are defined by and specific to a user. Each user can have only one personal address book. The contacts in personal address books may be shared with other users and workspaces.

Note:

The User Directory Service enables system administrators to define quotas for all address book types.

All address book types and user groups in Oracle Beehive also support external contacts, which are people who, although external to an enterprise, can be contacted by and collaborate with users. By default, all Oracle Beehive users are contacts, but not all contacts are users, such as in the cases of external contacts.

The User Directory Service also supports the contact-related needs of other Oracle Beehive services, such as the E-mail Service, the Instant Message Services, the Presence Service, and the Workspace Service, facilitating seamless communication and collaboration. The User Directory Service provides standardized contact management features, such as sending and importing vCards, as well as support for the contact management features of Microsoft Outlook, such as Global Address Lists.

Ways that Users Can Leverage the User Directory Service

The User Directory Service enables uses to manage their workspace and personal address books, including the ability to import address books and add external contacts. Additionally, users can apply tags (referred to as "categories" in Microsoft Outlook) to their contacts, to further differentiate contact attributes for their convenience and productivity. Tags are typically user-defined and can include such names as "Colleagues", "Family and Friends", and "Customers", among others.

Workflow Service

The Workflow Service supports and manages for Oracle Beehive all workflow settings and other aspects that are related to integrations with Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) components. Out of the box, Oracle Beehive contains an internal Oracle BPEL Process Manager instance and provides two default workflows for content management, which allow either serial or parallel approval-based capabilities for content. Integration with external Oracle BPEL Process Manager instances and workflows is also supported.

Collaboration Services

Collaboration Services provide team-based collaborative functionality such as e-mail, time management, and instant messaging.

Oracle Beehive provides the following Collaboration Services:

Content Management Services

Content management is an essential part of team collaboration, enabling users to share and distribute documents throughout their organizations while concurrently maintaining control and tracking changes. Collaborative content management improves an organization's knowledge sharing and communication capabilities by making content more readily available to users in a structured and secure way.

The Content Management Services support all aspects of file and document life cycle management, especially for unstructured content. The Content Management Services also support integration with the Records Management Service as well as business process automation technologies, such as Oracle BPEL Process Manager, for improved efficiencies, control, and compliance.

The Content Management Services provide the following key features:

  • Real-time status including whether the content is checked in or out, or currently in review

  • Versioning, including the time of the last change and by whom

  • Integration with workspaces, enabling users to post documents in workspaces for reviews and editing by other members

  • Content locking at the user level (explicit) and system level (implicit)

  • Support from desktop applications such as Microsoft Windows Explorer through WebDAV

  • Ability to edit a document in place (in its current location)

  • Standards and protocol support including WebDAV, JSR-170, File Transfer Protocol (FTP), and FTP over Transport Layer Security (TLS).

The Content Management Services include the following services:

FTP Service

The FTP Service supports and manages all content management-related features and settings that the system leverages through FTP and FTP over TLS, including:

  • Support for FTP clients such as CuteFTP, WS_FTP, and SmartFTP

  • Whether or not the specified FTP server is enabled for Oracle Beehive

  • The port number at which the FTP Service will listen for requests

  • The maximum number of ports the FTP Service can use for passive listening

  • The buffer size between streams during content uploads

  • The amount of time (in seconds) the service will allow a user session to remain inactive before terminating the session (timing out)

WebDAV Service

The WebDAV Service supports and manages all content management-related features and settings that the system leverages over the Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) protocol, including:

  • Support for WebDAV clients such as Microsoft Windows WebFolders

  • Whether or not the specified WebDAV server is enabled for Oracle Beehive

  • The default authentication scheme for WebDAV clients

  • Length of time (in minutes) before Web browser-based and WebDAV-based client cookies expire

  • The minimum value (in minutes) allowed for content locks

  • Length of time (in minutes) before the system refreshes each active user's preferences

  • The buffer size between streams during content uploads and downloads

  • Shortcuts for content

Discussions Service

The Discussions Service enables organizations to host threaded, online discussion forums in which users can browse message boards, and post and respond to messages. Through the Discussions Service, users post messages about a topic within a forum. Other users can then browse and reply to these messages. The Discussions Service manages the relationships of these messages (peer, parent, or child) and organizes them accordingly for intuitive search, presentation, and navigation.

Key features provided by the Discussions Service include:

  • Policy- and security-based filters including anti-spam capabilities

  • Pre-defined roles (moderator, reader, contributor, editor)

  • Permissions for users and groups

  • Programmatic access through Web Services

E-mail Service

The E-mail Service supports all aspects of e-mail creation, delivery, and management for Oracle Beehive, including by exposing e-mail from coexisting systems to supported clients. The E-mail Service enables users to organize and manage their e-mail messages in the context of Oracle Beehive workspaces. Users can create, send, receive, read, mark (flag), copy, move, delete, and save drafts of e-mail messages.

The E-mail Service also provides or supports the following features:

  • Delivery of voicemail messages and faxes as e-mail (leveraged through the Voice Message Service).

  • Delivery of e-mail messages to groups and distribution lists (leveraged through the User Directory Service).

  • Server-side rules (provided by the Subscription and Notification Services) for automated e-mail message management, enabling administrators and users to define a variety of actions, such as server-side sorting and categorization, for a wide range of events and conditions.

  • Managing e-mail messages as records through integration with the Records Management Service.

  • Anti-virus and anti-spam capabilities provided through supported applications.

  • Automated delivery receipts for e-mail messages.

  • Inclusion of custom and standardized disclaimers in e-mail messages.

  • Administration capabilities, including message monitoring, logging, and reporting, as well as queue and quota management.

Instant Message Services

The Instant Message Services support all aspects of instant messaging for Oracle Beehive. With the Instant Message Services, users can send text-based messages in real time. Users can also attach files to messages, and can broadcast messages to multiple recipients simultaneously, including to entire groups.

Through supported Oracle Beehive clients, the Instant Message Services also enable seamless transitions between instant messaging modes and conference types, including persistent chats, text conferences, and voice chats and conferences.

The Instant Message Services include of the following services:

Instant Message Service

The Instant Message Service provides core instant messaging features, including:

  • Message encryption

  • Rosters (buddy lists) based on Oracle Beehive address books and People lists

  • Presence support (provided by the Presence Service) with customizable status settings

  • Offline capabilities, such as sending an instant message through e-mail

  • Server-side message transcripts

XMPP Service

The XMPP Service supports and manages all the features and settings that the system exposes through the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) v 0.9 and 1.0, including:

  • Support for XMPP clients such as Pidgin (formerly Gaim), iChat, and Trillian Pro

  • Multiple authentication methods

  • Persistent chat rooms

  • The list of all supported messaging agents

  • The port number at which all XMPP servers will communicate

  • The port number at which the system will encrypt messages over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)

  • The default language for messages

Meeting Services

The Meeting Services support and manage all aspects of online meetings including Web-based voice conferences and chat rooms, enabling meeting organizers and participants to conduct collaborative sessions online through Oracle Beehive Conferencing.

The Meeting Services provide the following key features:

  • Simultaneous voice and audio support (full duplex)

    Note:

    Although Oracle Beehive Conferencing supports Microsoft Windows Vista, the Oracle Beehive voice conferencing features are not yet certified for that operating system. Therefore, the quality and performance of Oracle Beehive voice conferencing on Microsoft Windows Vista is not guaranteed.
  • Customizable client viewing window, including zooming and window resizing

  • Ability to manage meeting attendees online

  • Ability to share and control desktops, documents, and applications

  • Persistent chat rooms

The Meeting Services include the following services:

Conference Service

The Conference Service supports and manages many aspects of the Web conferencing features and settings provided by Oracle Beehive, including:

  • Default length of time (in seconds) after which external Public Switched Telephone Network (PTSN) and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) calls will time out of a conference.

  • The default codecs for Oracle Web Conference-based (OWC) voice and SIP-based participants.

  • The default mode (speaker or listener) of voice participants.

  • The default length of time (in seconds) after which a conference will end if the host doesn't join it.

  • The interval (in seconds) at which Oracle Beehive will push conference log records to persistent storage. These logs are used to restore sessions in the cases of service disruptions, therefore smaller intervals equate to more recent states.

  • Various SIP-based configuration settings such as the gateway port, gateway Internet Protocol (IP) address, and the SIP container transport (User Datagram Protocol or Transmission Control Protocol).

Conference Session Service

The Conference Session Service manages various aspects of the sessions for Oracle Beehive voice and Web conferences including the transport layer and flow of live information.

OWC Streaming Service

The OWC Streaming Service manages the settings for HTTP tunneling, the Real Time Message Protocol (RTMP), and the Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), including whether or not these services are enabled, their associated port numbers, and how many client connections are allowed.

Transcoding Service

The Transcoding Service supports and manages all the data- and audio-conversions for Oracle Beehive voice and Web conferences.

Time Management Services

The Time Management Services support all aspects of time and task management, as well as user, team, and resource scheduling for Oracle Beehive. The Time Management Services maintain and provide access to the latest calendar-based schedule information for all Oracle Beehive users, teams, and resources. This ensures that users can schedule meetings and presentations with each other easily and accurately, as well as reserve meeting rooms and equipment, all with minimal coordination efforts and schedule conflicts.

When creating a meeting, a task, or event with a specified timeframe, the Time Management Services enable users to invite other users, add details such as objectives and agendas, and attach documents.

Through workspaces, users can also leverage the Time Management Services to create notes and entries that inform others of upcoming dates, such as scheduled holidays and birthdays, and if they will be out of the office or otherwise unavailable. Users can also expose calendar entries in both their personal and team workspaces.

The Time Management Services provide the following key features:

  • Support for daily, weekly, and monthly calendar views

  • Automated reminders and alerts

  • Recurring tasks and meetings

  • Import and export of iCalendar data

  • Invitations for meeting or event participants, including external contacts (through iCalendar)

  • Designations for required and optional attendees

  • Real-time schedule conflict checking and resolution capabilities

  • Time zone support and synchronization

  • Support for holiday calendars

  • Support for the Calendaring Extensions to WebDAV (CalDAV) protocol

The Time Management Services include the following services:

Alarm Service

The Alarm Service handles all time management-related alerts for the system. The Alarm Service enables users to configure and receive alerts, such as reminders prior to meeting start times. The Alarm Service is also responsible for signaling the activation of other services at preconfigured times.

CalDAV Service

The CalDAV Service supports and manages all time management-related features and settings that the system leverages over the Calendaring Extensions to WebDAV (CalDAV) protocol, including:

  • Support for CalDAV clients, such as Apple iCal, Mozilla Lightning, and Mozilla Sunbird.

  • Session cache settings, such as the maximum number of entries allowed in the authentication token table and the amount of time (in seconds) an authentication token is valid.

  • Directory cache settings, such as the maximum number of entries allowed in the directory cache and the amount of time (in seconds) an entry is valid.

  • Collection-related settings, such as whether or not browsing on collections is enabled and the default media type for collections if none is specified in client requests.

The CalDAV Service supports Internet Calendar Subscription, also known as WebCal Subscription. Internet Calendar Subscription can provide users with read access to collections of calendar entries though client applications that do not support the CalDAV protocol.

Resource Directory Service

The Resource Directory Service provides a common definition for all Oracle Beehive resources as well as a centralized location to access and manage resource entries. The Resource Directory Service manages all aspects of the resources provided in Oracle Beehive directories, enabling users to view and schedule resources through supported time management features. This includes related settings such as the total number of resources returned in search results. Resources typically include reservable, non-human entities such as a meeting rooms, computers, and projectors.

The Resource Directory Service enables administrators to define a variety of resources, including physical locations and equipment. Examples of physical locations that can be defined include classrooms, training rooms, conference rooms, offices, and cubicles. Examples of equipment that can be defined include projectors, monitors, and computers.

The Resource Directory Service enables users to perform the following tasks:

  • Search for resources by name, type, capacity, or tag

  • Manage resources and configure resource booking behavior

  • Reserve resources through meeting invitations

Time Management Service

The Time Management Service provides the coordination services for the core aspects of Oracle Beehive calendars, scheduling, task management, and reminders. This includes support for multiple calendars and task lists in workspaces, automatic updates of group-based invitations and task assignments resulting from group definition changes, and the integration of BPEL-based tasks and processes.

Through the features provided by the Time Management Service, users can perform the following tasks:

  • Manage team and personal calendars, tasks, and events

  • Self-enroll in calendars

  • Specify designates for calendars

  • Verify free/busy status of other users and teams

  • Invite users, teams, and workspace members to meetings

  • Respond to invitations and task assignments

  • Assign roles to meeting attendees such as "required", "optional", and so forth

  • Manage subscriptions to calendars of interest and automatically receive invitations to new events

  • Initiate user presence changes based on calendar events

  • Assign tasks to users, groups, and workspaces

Time Zone Service

The Time Zone Service supports and manages all aspects of synchronizing user schedules and calendar entries across global time zones. The Time Zone Service, in effect, is the central authority that unifies the coordination of all time zone-related components and activities in Oracle Beehive.

Voice Message Service

The Voice Message Service supports all aspects of voicemail and fax management for Oracle Beehive.

Through the Voice Message Service, users can perform the following tasks:

  • Manage their voicemail messages and faxes (retrieve, archive, and delete).

  • Record multiple voicemail greetings.

  • Search their corporate directories through phones.

  • Transfer calls to voicemail mailboxes, auto-attendants, and external numbers.

The Voice Message Service can be leveraged by the E-mail Service, enabling delivery of voicemail messages and faxes as e-mail. The Voice Message Service also supports multiple locations, including private branch exchanges (PBXs), and multiple languages, enabling enterprises to support a variety of network and user needs all within a single Oracle Beehive instance. Supported options include integration of existing telephony infrastructures with Oracle Beehive.

Enterprise Services

Enterprise Services provide extensions to functions that are leveraged at the enterprise level, such as search, mobile connectivity, and subscription and notification.

Oracle Beehive provides the following Enterprise Services:

Mobility Services

Ideally, a user should be able to purchase the mobile device of his or her choosing, take it out of the box, set it up quickly, and then make use of the collaborative capabilities that it provides. To ensure quick set up, continued ease of use, and increased user productivity, enterprises require successful mobile device strategies. The Mobility Services provided by Oracle Beehive can be a key part of such a strategy, as they:

  • Extend collaborative capabilities to the mobile device users.

  • Provide key device management capabilities, such as enabling easy self-serve user setup where software and configuration settings can be pushed to devices automatically.

  • Comply with open standards, protecting current investments for future generations of devices.

Oracle Beehive's Mobile Services along with a large partner community of device manufacturers and third-party vendors allow for a complete, secure, device- and network-agnostic mobile solution that supports a wide variety of mobile devices.

The Mobility Services provide the following key features:

  • Automatic synchronization of e-mail, calendar, task, and address book data

  • User-defined preferences including device behavior and control

  • Self-service user provisioning

  • Protocol server support and administration

  • Support for Microsoft Windows Mobile Outlook through the Oracle Beehive Mobile Outlook Plug-in

  • Support for third-party IMAP, OMA-DS, and XMPP clients

  • Security features such as data wipes

The Mobility Services include the following services:

Mobile Device Management Service

The Mobile Device Management Service manages the communications and configuration settings for the Mobile Device Management Server, which enables connections between the Device Management Service and supported device-resident Mobile Device Management clients.

The Mobile Device Management Service supports the following settings:

  • The maximum number of concurrent connections supported by the Mobile Device Management Server.

  • The amount of time (in minutes) the service will allow a mobile session to remain inactive before terminating the session (timing out). Settings provided for both authenticated and non-authenticated sessions.

  • The number of invalid commands a mobile client may send to the Mobile Device Management Server before the system terminates the session.

Mobile Data Sync Service

The Mobile Data Sync Service is based on OMA-DS 1.2 and provides for automatic synchronization of e-mail, calendar, task, and address book data for any mobile device with an OMA-DS compliant client. The service supports suspend/resume functionality, compression, one-way synchronization, and default address books. The service also manages all mobile-related features and settings for OMA-DS standard clients, including:

  • Whether or not support for OMA-DS is enabled.

  • Whether or not synchronization is enabled for each mobile data type, including calendar, e-mail, and contact data.

  • Whether or not MD5 authentication is enabled for connections between mobile clients and the Mobile Data Sync Server.

  • Log file creation settings, including whether or not the system will create log files for synchronization sessions, and the number of days the system will retain these logs files.

  • The maximum number of concurrent requests that the Mobile Data Sync Server will allow.

  • The amount of time (in minutes) the service will allow a synchronization session to remain inactive before terminating the session (timing out).

Mobile Mail Service

The Mobile Mail Service provides a complete Push IMAP (P-IMAP) v0.6 implementation for real-time delivery of e-mail to users' mobile devices. The service also manages the features and settings related to push mail, including:

  • The maximum number of concurrent users that the Mobile Mail Service will allow.

  • The maximum number of e-mail messages that the Mobile Mail Service will allow in each user's mobile device inbox.

  • The number of invalid login attempts that the Mobile Mail Service will allow each mobile user to make before closing a connection.

  • Whether or not connections to the specified IMAP server are enabled.

Mobile Push Service

The Mobile Push Service is responsible for delivering notifications to push clients running on end users' mobile devices. It is, in essence, an event dispatcher for those devices. For example, Mobile Push Service alerts can indicate changes in users' inboxes, calendars, task lists, and address books. Alerts can also prompt users to take action on corresponding device management events.

In addition, the Mobile Push Service manages the following features and settings:

  • The Internet-accessible address, port number range, and type of the listener for the Mobile Push Server. Supported types include HTTP, TCP, and the Oracle Beehive Transport Infrastructure (BTI).

  • The amount of time (in minutes) of inactivity the service will allow before terminating an unauthenticated session.

  • The maximum number of concurrent connections that the Mobile Push Service will allow.

  • The number of invalid login attempts that the Mobile Push Service will allow before closing a connection.

Records Management Service

The Records Management Service supports all aspects of records management of documents and e-mail for Oracle Beehive through integration with Oracle Universal Records Management (URM). Oracle URM enables organizations to manage their records and retention policies, disposition processes, and litigation holds or freezes in a central repository known as a Universal Records Management (URM) server. Organizations can then apply their policies, dispositions, and holds to content stored in other systems, such as Oracle Beehive. Although the lifecycles of records associated with e-mail messages and documents are managed by Oracle URM, the artifacts themselves exist in the Oracle Beehive content and message repositories.

Search Service

The Search Service supports and manages all aspects of user-initiated, text-based searches for Oracle Beehive.

The Search Service enables users to search for e-mail messages, documents, and meeting entries through the following search features:

  • Basic keyword searches

  • Advanced, multiple criteria-based searches including tags and extended properties

  • Directed searches limited to specific folders and folder hierarchies

  • Wildcard searches

  • Streaming results

  • Search results manipulation, including sorting based on relevance and metadata

  • Snippets presented with search results

The Search Service is optimized to maintain a complete up-to-date index for Oracle Beehive artifacts, which ensures sub-second response times and superior relevancy. To allow for searches across all enterprise information repositories, such as those outside of Oracle Beehive, the Search Service can be integrated with Oracle Secure Enterprise Search. In this case, Oracle Beehive is configured in Oracle Secure Enterprise Search as a federated data source.

For more information on this option, please refer to one or both of the following topics:

  • "Deploying Oracle Beehive with Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g" in the Oracle Beehive Deployment Guide.

  • "Setting up Federated Sources" in the Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g Administrator's Guide.

Subscription and Notification Services

The Subscription and Notification Services support and manage all aspects of user-based subscriptions to business events and the resulting notifications. The Subscription and Notification Services enable users to subscribe to specific business events, such as document updates, and to be notified through one or more channels when those events occur. Supported notification channels include e-mail, instant message, and Simple Message Service (SMS).

Users can manage their subscriptions and notifications for a full range of important business events, including:

  • Meeting invitations

  • Task assignments

  • Workflow initiations

  • Resource approvals

  • Document changes

The Subscription and Notification Services supports user-defined delivery rules for each subscription and notification, including user-based notification preferences such as delivery to one or more notification channels as well as requests for additional information. Support for cloning and copying subscriptions can also be provided through custom development leveraging the Web Services API Service.

The Subscription and Notification Services include the following services:

Notification Service

The Notification Service handles all aspects of creating and delivering messages and notifications for Oracle Beehive, including notifications on which users can take actions (referred to as "actionable" notifications). Message support includes e-mail and instant messages.

SMS Service

The SMS Service is responsible for the delivery of SMS messages over the Short Message Peer-to-Peer (SMPP) protocol.

Subscription Service

The Subscription Service handles all aspects of subscription logic for Oracle Beehive subscriptions.

Workspace Service

The Workspace Service supports all the features and functionality provided by Oracle Beehive personal and team workspaces. Workspaces are the core of the user experience with Oracle Beehive, especially in regard to the collaborative activities of teams. Therefore, the Workspace Service is responsible for consolidating and exposing, in a single location, the collaborative functionality provided by the other Oracle Beehive services, including:

Within workspaces, users can manage their artifacts in a way so that they are stored once but can be referenced by multiple workspaces. The Workspace Service also enables users to associate, categorize, and manage their artifacts using bonds, tags, metadata, and folders, as well as discard artifacts in trash folders, with archive, restore, and purge capabilities. Workspace folder features that users can leverage include inheritance, versions, locks, and workflows. Users can also create associations, or bonds, between artifacts for intuitive organization and retrieval.

In addition to collaborating with other workspace members and managing their artifacts, the Workspace Service provides users with self-service administrative features, such as the ability to:

  • Create new workspaces

  • Edit workspace names and descriptions

  • Specify workspace memberships

  • List workspaces in the Workspace Directory

  • Enable "open" or "invite-only" membership modes

The Workspace Service provides XML-based templates that serve as blueprints for creating workspaces, as well as for specifying default folder hierarchies and content, custom roles, and pre-seeded calendar events, tasks, contacts, and more. The Workspace Service also enables administrators to configure workspace settings, such as soft and hard quotas as well as default content versioning.

Platform Services

Platform Services enable organizations to leverage the Oracle Beehive platform and its APIs, and support integration and coexistence with third-party components, Web services, and custom solutions.

Oracle Beehive provides the following Platform Services:

API Services

The API Services enable organizations to build and integrate custom solutions that leverage the APIs that Oracle Beehive supports or provides, and include the following:

Web Services API Service

The Web Services API Service enables organizations to build and integrate custom solutions with Oracle Beehive through Web Services. The Web Services API Service exposes Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 1.2 Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) interfaces and leverages the Web Services Security (WS-Security) standard of the Oracle Application Server. The Web Services API Service provides an abstraction of the Oracle Beehive Object Model, or BOM, which is what Oracle Beehive is built around and which exposes all user-facing collaboration functionality.

Coexistence Service

The Coexistence Service enables organizations to integrate and leverage existing, third-party systems and components, such as Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, with Oracle Beehive for maximum interoperability. This enables users of Oracle Beehive and users of other systems to collaborate with each other beyond the limited capabilities of e-mail.

The Coexistence Service also provides for a non-intrusive deployment approach, giving users a choice in how they access their data, either from Oracle Beehive or from other clients, such as Microsoft Outlook. With this approach, users can be introduced to Oracle Beehive and its contextual environment without needing to immediately adopt and adapt to it.

With the Coexistence Service, users can leverage the following functions transparently for interoperability between Oracle Beehive and Microsoft Exchange Server:

  • Time management: Users can create, view, and manage meeting entries in both Oracle Beehive and Microsoft Outlook. This includes inviting users hosted by either system to meetings.

  • Task management: Users can create, view, and manage tasks in both Oracle Beehive and Microsoft Outlook. This includes assigning tasks to users hosted by either system.

  • E-mail management: Users can create, view, and manage e-mail messages in both Oracle Beehive and Microsoft Outlook.

  • Contact management: Users can create, view, and manage contacts in both Oracle Beehive and Microsoft Outlook.