Oracle has announced enhancements to its Beehive collaboration software, with the aim of positioning it more strongly against offerings from Microsoft and IBM.
"The market leaders are groupware products that have grown up", says Oracle's senior vice president of collaboration technologies, David Gilmour. "Collaboration was layered on after the fact, not designed that way in the beginning. Beehive is almost the complete inverse of that."
Gilmour was CEO of collaboration vendor Tacit Software, which Oracle acquired. Tacit offered a cutting-edge "expertise location" platform that tracked employees' usage to build a profile of their expertise that could be found by other employees.
Not only can end users employ existing email or IM clients of their choice with Beehive, but IT managers can continue to use Microsoft Exchange in conjunction with Beehive, Gilmour says.