Oracle's Beehive aims to help project collaboration

Oracle on Monday unveiled a new open enterprise software application designed to improve the way users collaborate and communicate on projects.

Oracle's Beehive is a three-year-old project that the acquisition-happy software giant built from scratch. The goal is to take a company's setup, in which various communication and collaboration software applications from a number of vendors are running on an army of servers, and integrate the offerings into one Beehive system, Charles Phillips, Oracle co-president, said during the company's annual Oracle OpenWorld developers conference in San Francisco.

Beehive seeks to take communication software, from email to instant messaging to chat, and the various security rules, databases and storage that are tied to each product on separate servers, and integrate them with few servers on one platform. For example, one security rule would be set to handle disparate functions across the servers, yet the user interface would appear the same to users, even though they may be using different instant-messaging applications.

Collaboration features are also built into the Beehive software, which allow users to add members to their collaboration team, once the new member has accepted the invitation. Once members have been added to the collaboration team, the software will automatically populate their calendar with the team's meetings dates, they will be added to the team's email loop and will be able to share documents, video, and other materials through Beehive's team workspace feature.

During the event, Phillips briefly shared the stage with swimmer and Olympic gold medallist extraordinaire Michael Phelps, who discussed his determination to set a record for the number of gold medals earned. Phelps took home eight gold medals from this year's Beijing Olympics and has 14 career gold medals. As for the buttoned-down Phillips, he joked that he was relieved that he and Phelps didn't have to don swimsuits.

Other news coming out of OracleWorld included the following:

• Oracle officially added two industry-specific business units to its acquisition-happy approach to widening its breadth of applications for targeted sectors. One will include an insurance business unit, which was recently bolstered by the company's acquisition of Skywire Software, and the other is a health-sciences business unit.
• The company unveiled an update to Oracle E-Business Suite 12, with a preview of E-Business Suite 12.1. The latest version will include enhanced financial applications, with an emphasis on offering more global financial-management capabilities, as well as adding supply-chain and manufacturing features.
• The recent acquisition of middleware vendor BEA Systems has met its integration milestones and product roadmap laid out in July.