1 Overview of Oracle Beehive Administration

Oracle Beehive is a new, powerful, and unified platform and application for enterprise collaboration. With an architecture that is built on Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE), Oracle Beehive offers a new paradigm for enterprise collaboration: a unified offering for in-context, team-based collaboration.

With Oracle Beehive, users can seamlessly collaborate in teams or individually. Oracle Beehive enables all users to easily save, organize, find, and share the content that they create during the course of their collaborative projects and day-to-day activities. Enterprise colleagues and key partners can leverage the platform to seamlessly interact in a variety of convenient and effective ways.

Oracle Beehive provides familiar collaborative features such as time management, instant messaging, content management, and e-mail, among others, and unifies them in a cohesive platform and application. The Oracle Beehive platform is also built on proven, cost effective, and secure Oracle technologies, such as Oracle Database and Oracle Application Server, for reliability, manageability, and performance.

Getting Started with Oracle Beehive

To get started administering Oracle Beehive, you should first ensure that your installation is complete, and then perform any necessary post-install tasks.

Post-install tasks might include any of the following:

• Changing port numbers for various services to new values

• Configuring Oracle Beehive to synchronize with a third-party, LDAP-based user directory

• Installing or configuring a security certificate to enable secure communications protocols such as SSL

• Creating a backup of your deployment in its fresh, successfully-installed state

For a complete listing of post-installation tasks, see the "Oracle Beehive Post-Installation Procedures" module in the Oracle Beehive Installation Guide relevant to your platform.

If you have finished performing all post-install tasks, you can begin working with Oracle Beehive. You should begin by familiarizing yourself with the Oracle Beehive beectl command-line utility.

Managing Oracle Beehive using beectl

Access the Oracle Beehive beectl command-line utility from the following directory on any Oracle Beehive Application tier:

$ORACLE_HOME/beehive/bin

The Oracle Beehive beectl utility is always used in conjunction with a qualifying command. When running an beectl command, the following syntax should be used:

beectl command --option <argument>

Where command represents the beectl command, --option represents an available option(s) to use with the command, and <argument> represents a valid argument passed with an option.

For complete documentation of the various beectl commands and options, see "Oracle Beehive Command-Line Utility" in Module 2 of the Oracle Beehive Administrator's Reference Guide.

Managing Oracle Beehive using Oracle Beekeeper

If you have installed the Oracle Beekeeper administrative user interface, you can perform many common administration tasks using a Web interface, rather than the command-line utility.

In this Guide, in most cases administration procedures are described using the command-line interface only. Refer to the online help integrated with Oracle Beekeeper for assistance with performing administration procedures using the Web interface.

Access Oracle Beekeeper by pointing a Web browser to the URL that was displayed at the end of the Oracle Beekeeper installation. By default, the URL is http://<server_name>:7778/bkpr . The URL for your installation might be different if you specified a different port number as one of the post-install steps.

Refer to Chapter 27, Oracle Beehive Beekeeper Post-Installation Procedures in the Oracle Beehive Installation Guide for your platform, for details.

Managing Oracle Beehive using Clients

Some administration tasks may be accomplished by using Oracle Beehive clients. These tasks are typically oriented towards creating or managing Oracle Beehive entities, such as workspaces, groups, event subscriptions, and resources. The exact functionality exposed varies between the possible clients. For example, using Oracle Beehive Extensions for Outlook exposes workspaces, calendar events, tasks, and resources, while a pure e-mail client such as Mozilla Thunderbird exposes a more limited subset of functionality.

Your First Administration Tasks in Oracle Beehive

The following are some suggestions for first administration tasks using Oracle Beehive, and how to learn more about doing each of them:

• Create a structure of organizations to model your user population

• Create and provision some users and groups

  See "Managing and Provisioning Oracle Beehive Users" for details.

• Create some team workspaces

  See "Managing Oracle Beehive Workspaces" for details.

• Create some resources

  See "Managing Oracle Beehive Resources" for details.

• Enable Oracle Collaboration Coexistence Gateway, and provision users for coexistence.

  See "Configuring and Managing Oracle Collaboration Coexistence Gateway" for details

• Configure Oracle Beehive Mobility Services

  See "Managing Oracle Beehive Mobility Services" for details.

Although the above list is not exhaustive, it is sufficient to expose some of the basic functionality of Oracle Beehive.