Contents

• Summary
• Oracle Beehive: Overview
• Oracle Beehive: Commentary
• Initial Contributions to the ICOM TC
• Analyst Groups: Convergence of Communication, Collaboration, Content
• OASIS ICOM TC Charter and Call for Participation
• ICOM TC News and Updates
• Principal References

Update February 21, 2009: The inaugural meeting of the OASIS ICOM Technical Committee was scheduled to be held on March 3, 2009 at 1:00 PM EST in a teleconference hosted by Oracle. The latest date for registration to become a initial member of this TC was Tuesday, February 24, 2009 (11:59 PM EST). OASIS members eligible to vote at the initial ICOM TC Meeting included Rafiul Ahad (Oracle), Eric S. Chan (Oracle), Martin Chapman (Oracle), Stefan Decker (DERI Galway), Patrick Durusau (Individual), Siegfried Handschuh (DERI Galway), Mark Pallot (ESoCE-NET). Vassilios Peristeras (DERI Galway), and Ramesh Vasudevan (Oracle).

Update January 30, 2009: OASIS issued a Call for Participation in the Integrated Collaboration Object Model for Interoperable Collaboration Services (ICOM) TC.

On January 07, 2009, OASIS announced the submission of a draft charter for a new OASIS Technical Committee to define an integrated collaboration object model supporting a complete range of enterprise collaboration activities. The proposed data model is based upon the Oracle Beehive Object Model (BOM), to be contributed by Oracle to the ICOM TC. The new standard model, interface, and protocol would support contextual collaboration within business processes for an integrated collaboration environment which includes communication artifacts (e.g., email, instant message, telephony, RSS), teamwork artifacts (such as project and meeting workspaces, discussion forums, real-time conferences, presence, activities, subscriptions, wikis, and blogs), content artifacts (e.g., text and multi-media contents, contextual connections, taxonomies, folksonomies, tags, recommendations, social bookmarking, saved searches), and coordination artifacts (such as address books, calendars, tasks) etc.

The charter for the proposed OASIS Integrated Collaboration Object Model for Interoperable Collaboration Services (ICOM) Technical Committee is supported by representatives from Oracle, DERI, Nortel, ESoCE-NET, and Fraunhofer FIT. As proposed, the first TC meeting would be held March 3, 2009 with Martin Chapman (Oracle) as Convenor.

Members of the OASIS ICOM TC will produce an Integrated Collaboration Object Model (ICOM) for Interoperable Collaboration Services Specification and associated UML 2.0 model. The TC will also produce the non-normative matter (which may include models, architectures, and guidelines) for the interoperability protocols to facilitate composite collaboration services for shared workspaces.

A key business problem, as described in the proposed ICOM TC Charter, is that

"Organizations need to integrate their collaboration services with business applications in order to enable contextual collaboration within an end-to-end business process, such as customer relationship management, procurement, performance, and project management, to improve business efficiencies. Typically these organizations have incrementally deployed a mix of disjoint collaboration tools. As a result, these organizations face technical obstacles and high costs in their quests to integrate these disjoint tools and the data each tool produces. To solve this problem, various collaboration vendors have attempted to unify their platforms in order to build a single collaboration environment which provides full range of collaboration activities. However, these vendor specific platforms still lack a standard model, interface, and protocol to support contextual collaboration within business processes. Without a standard collaboration model that can provide a complete range of collaboration activities, customers, ISVs, and integrators face a difficult challenge to build contextual collaboration environments using service components from multiple vendors..."

Thus: "Given the large number of components involved in a complete and integrated collaboration environment, we need an integrated object model to eliminate impedances and promote seamless and natural transitions between components. A standard integrated and complete collaboration model is essential also for tools developers, business applications developers, and Web 2.0 applications developers to write to the industry standard model, API, and protocol to interoperate with integrated collaboration environments across different communities..."

The ICOM TC charter's Statement of Purpose clarifies that

"The purpose of the Integrated Collaboration Object Model for Interoperable Collaboration Services Technical Committee is to specify the normative standards for collaboration objects, along with their attributes, relationships, constraints, and behavior, in an integrated and interoperable collaboration environment. ICOM specification will include the non-normative guidelines (providing architectures or use-case scenarios) for a new workspace-oriented protocol for shared workspaces that supports a full range of collaboration activities, including unified messages, web conferences, forums, presence, calendars, tasks, wikis, blogs, social networks, etc. ICOM specification can be used as the basis for defining bindings to various languages (Java, C#, WSDL, RDF/OWL). ICOM specification can also provide a framework to render a suite of new and existing protocols, including WebDav, CalDav, IMAP, SMTP, XMPP, etc., protocols, to work as if they are parts of a contiguous protocol..."

The enterprise collaboration problem statement and technical solution articulated in the ICOM draft charter align closely with Oracle Beehive Release 1 (1.4), as documented below. The Oracle Beehive Concepts document (Release 1.4) identifies several "Challenges of Enterprise Collaboration"; some of the most common and far-reaching challenges that Oracle Beehive addresses include: disjointed collaboration tools, explosive information growth, collaboration among geographically dispersed teams, disparate data silos, and regulatory compliance requirements.

Key features of Oracle Beehive for enabling effective enterprise collaboration, include: a Comprehensive Set of Collaboration Services (Time management, Calendar, Project management, Content and document management, Task management, Instant messaging, Email, Voicemail, Discussion forums, Online presence, Contact management [personal and workgroup address book], Mobile device support, Web conferencing, etc); In-Context Workspaces (a workspace as a virtual location and container that provides users a place and context for collaboration); Integration with Collaborative Applications and Other Components; Custom Development (including APIs for Oracle Beehive Web services); Centralized Administration; Flexible Deployment Options; Clients for Accessing Oracle Beehive; and Delegation. Details are provided in the 1.4 reference documentation. In the case of Web Conferencing, for example, support includes: Ad hoc and scheduled meetings, Voice conferencing, Presentation management, Desktop sharing, Attendee list management, Intra-conference instant chats, Meeting alerts and requests, etc.

The ICOM TC supporters have nominated nine resources to be contributed initially to the TC's technical work:

1. Oracle Beehive Object Model (BOM), edited by Terry M. Olkin and Eric S. Chan (Oracle), August 31, 2008
2. Oracle Beehive Release 1.4 Collaboration Service Interface (CSI) Java docs
3. Oracle Beehive Organization, applicable work performed between August 2008 and the start of the work of the ICOM TC
4. DERI Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC)
5. DERI NEPOMUK Semantic Layered Architecture (SLA)
6. ECOSPACE Reference Architecture Basic Collaborative Services (BCS)
7. ECOSPACE Composite Collaborative Services (CoCoS)
8. ECOSPACE Distributed Document Context (D2C)
9. ECOSPACE Extended SIOC

The scope of the ICOM TC's work is to continue further refinement, extension, and finalization of the Input Documents to produce as output specifications, in the language neutral UML 2.0 representation, that standardize applicable classes, attributes, relationships, constraints, and methods. Specifically:

1. data model for the set of objects in the integrated collaboration (IC) environment
2. persistent identification of the IC objects to support permanent references to the objects that may migrate amongst interoperable IC repositories
3. characteristics of the objects in terms of classes, interfaces, attributes, and relationships to other objects
4. operations on the objects in the integrated collaboration (IC) environment, inluding methods to create, delete, move, copy, send, post, version, subscribe, etc.
5. service interfaces, including methods and method signatures, which support controller aspects of the IC platform and operations on the IC objects
6. minimal unified access control model for the IC objects and operations
7. extensibility model for objects by application defined object schema and attribute definitions
8. expansiveness of the IC model to span multiple IC platforms from one or more vendors
9. openness of the IC model for interoperability across multiple IC platforms from one or more vendors
10. viability of the IC model to define the interoperability protocol for developing composite collaboration services for shared workspaces

The anticipated audience for the ICOM TC technical work includes:

• Vendors offering products designed to support applications using the IC platform
• Vendors offering applications that mashup IC objects from one or more IC repositories and services in the Internet
• Other specification authors that need the IC object model as a reference model
• Software architects and programmers, who design, write, integrate, and deploy applications using the IC object model
• End users implementing solutions that require interoperable, mashup solutions using continuity of references to IC objects that may migrate amongst IC environments, potentially across sites or enterprises for business, social, or technical reasons

Oracle Beehive: Overview

The central goal of the OASIS ICOM TC is to define a standard collaboration model ("standard model", "standard integrated and complete collaboration model", "standards for collaboration objects") as reflected in the TC name "Integrated Collaboration Object Model for Interoperable Collaboration Services (ICOM) TC" and proposed specificcation title Integrated Collaboration Object Model (ICOM) for Interoperable Collaboration Services Specification. The basis for the data model for the integrated collaboration object model, per the TC Scope Statement, is Oracle Beehive Object Model (BOM). This section presents an overview of Oracle Beehive and its comprehensive data integration model. Descriptions of the model (implemented in the Oracle software product/platform) are excerpted from published documentation, and are expanded in the published Beehive Object Model document.

Oracle Beehive is now (2009-01) at Release 1 (1.4), dated December 19, 2008 or later. It was documented in the Oracle Enterprise Manager Concepts volume (10g Release 4 [10.2.0.4], B31949-07) in January 2008, and probably earlier, since Beehive is said to have been under development for three years. While Oracle Beehive is successor to the Oracle Collaboration Suite (OCS), it is described as an entirely new product.

Oracle Beehive was (evidently) introduced to analyst firms in May 2008 (Gartner, Oracle Beehive), per the description from Gartner ("Oracle Jumps Into the Collaboration Market (Again)"): "On May 08, 2008, "Oracle introduced to market Oracle Beehive, an integrated collaboration suite with e-mail/calendar, team workspaces, instant messaging and other collaboration services. The initial release is intended for Oracle Collaboration Suite (OCS) users, with a wider launch expected later in 2008." Beehive was featured in several demonstrations at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, September 22-23, 2008.

Oracle Beehive is "Oracle's integrated and secure software platform for Enterprise Collaboration. It is a collaborative environment built on a unique model that combines the various communication and coordination services into a comprehensive platform... Beehive provides individuals a personal workspace which surfaces the typical collaboration services, such as messaging, time management, presence, instant messaging, task management, document, voice and web conferencing, mobile, and voicemail. Not only does Beehive provide a personal workspace for individuals to work on their own private efforts, but also Beehive also provides a team workspace for their teams.

Oracle Beehive "provides a complete range of collaboration services including conferencing, instant messaging, email, calendar, and team workspaces that can be deployed either on premise or through Oracle On Demand. Its cross-platform, open standards based architecture supports familiar clients like Microsoft Outlook and can coexist with Microsoft Exchange. Oracle Beehive delivers the next generation of collaboration through an integrated user experience and unified administration that leverages the enterprise capabilities built into Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Database, and Oracle Applications..." [White Paper]

Beehive Object Model

From the White Paper: "Beehive Object Model: The Beehive Object Model (BOM) is an all-inclusive notion of collaborative objects, artifacts, and users, and the bonds between the objects. The BOM embodies the unique vision of Beehive — a unified collaboration platform — which includes management of collaborative artifacts regardless of type, a single notion of groups, links between artifacts and common access control. By presenting the BOM through Web services, IT can use Beehive to support multiple use cases. With an extensible data model and collaboration services exposed through Web Services, Oracle Beehive integrates collaboration and business data and provides ubiquitous knowledge exposed through specialized applications. IT can be more responsive to business requirements for collaborative solutions..."

From the September 22, 2008 announcement: "By using a unified object model and taking advantage of the security capabilities in the Oracle Database, Oracle Beehive provides a centralized, secure and auditable collaboration platform that helps organizations reduce the cost and complexity of regulatory compliance and legal discovery."

Oracle Beehive Web Services API Service (as documented in Oracle Beehive Concepts Release 1 (1.4), Part Number E13794-02) supplies an abstract representation of the Oracle Beehive Object Model (BOM), to be contributed to the OASIS ICOM TC: "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."

The reference documentation for Fundamental Oracle Beehive Terms and Concepts supplies a prose/documentation view of Beehive core entities and objects:

• Entities, Actors, and Artifacts: "An entity is a securable, identifiable object in Oracle Beehive, such as a service, user, workspace, and artifact. In essence, every object in Oracle Beehive is an entity. An actor is an entity, such as a user or service, that acts upon other entities. Artifacts are another entity sub-class and represent objects that users can view, create, modify, or delete. Artifacts are the results of communications and other collaborative activities, and include e-mail messages, appointments, meetings, tasks, online discussions, notes, and documents. Oracle Beehive stores artifacts in Oracle Database."

• A service "is a discrete implementation of specific functionality that users and other services can leverage to accomplish a task. The capabilities and interactions of services enable the full scope of functionality that Oracle Beehive provides. Through supported client devices and graphical user interfaces (GUIs), Oracle Beehive visually exposes to users the features and functions of some services. Other services operate in the background and play low-level roles within the system such as enabling key integrations with other systems. Examples of services whose features Oracle Beehive exposes visually to users include the E-mail Service, the Time Management (Calendar) Service, and the Content Management Service. Examples of services whose roles enable underlying system functionality and are, therefore, mostly hidden from users include the Authentication Service, the Policy Service, and the Coexistence Service..."

• Enterprises and Organizations: "An enterprise is a logical collection of the entities that comprise an Oracle Beehive deployment, such as organizations, workspaces, and users. Organizations are narrowly defined groups within an enterprise. Typically, an organization is defined by a department or line of business, but it can also be based on a project or other criteria. The hierarchical relationship between enterprises and organizations in Oracle Beehive provides a logical structure for organizing users, groups, and workspaces, while enabling many aspects of the collaborative functionality offered by the system. This structure also enables system administrators to more easily manage users and workspaces through their organizational associations..."

• Workspaces: "A workspace is a both a virtual location and a container that provides Oracle Beehive users a place to collaborate, and enables them to create, view, store, access, and manage the artifacts related to their collaborations. From the user perspective, workspaces appear in supported Oracle Beehive clients. Workspaces expose to users the many collaborative services that Oracle Beehive provides, enabling users to seamlessly perform a wide range of collaborative activities in a single, intuitive place. In workspaces, users can create, view, and manage e-mail messages, calendar appointments, meetings, tasks, contacts, instant messages, and documents, and so forth. Oracle Beehive provides two types of workspaces: team workspaces and personal workspaces..."

Oracle Beehive Web Services:

"Oracle Beehive Web Services provide an abstract representation of Oracle Beehive data and metadata. It provides Web Services Description Language (WSDL) files, enabling developers to invoke its services from custom applications through open standards such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 1.2 and Web Services Security (WS-Security), which is based on SOAP and includes Security Assertions Markup Language (SAML). With Oracle Beehive Web Services, developers can build and integrate Web applications with Oracle Beehive in any environment that can generate a proxy implementation from WSDLs, including non-OC4J environments such as Microsoft .NET. To build such applications, developers can use whatever development tools that suit their needs, such as Oracle JDeveloper, Eclipse IDE, and Microsoft Visual Studio..."

See Oracle Beehive Release 1 (1.4) Basic Web Services Samples.

The Oracle Beehive Application Developer's Guide provides a documentation module on Oracle Beehive Web Services, together with their methods and the data types they use, for example:

• AddressBookService Methods: Manage personal or team workspace address books and their contents, such as contacts and groups
• CalendarService Methods: Manage personal or team workspace calendars, task lists, meetings , invitations, tasks, task assignments, reminders and Free/Busy information
• ConferenceService Methods: Manage Web conferences, including retrieving information about completed and running Web conference sessions
• DeviceService Methods: Manage devices, which are supported client software installed on computers, such as Oracle Beehive Integration for Outlook, and mobile devices
• DiscussionForumService Methods: Manage threaded, online discussion forums, in which users post messages about a topic within a forum. These methods manage and organize forums, topics, and messages
• DocumentService Methods: Manage documents in personal or team workspaces
• FolderService Methods: Manage messaging and document folders in personal or team workspaces
• GeneralArtifactService Methods: Manage object metadata and data relationships, as well as provide cross artifact capabilities, searching, and notification capabilities
• GroupService Methods: Directly manage personal, workspace, or system groups without having to navigate through scope details such as enterprise, organization and workspace
• MembershipService Methods: Provides methods to retrieve, modify, and delete users and groups in the system. To retrieve the members of a group, specify a FULL projection type with the GetGroup method. To retrieve the members of a workspace, specify a FULL projection in a filter with the GetWorkspaces method
• MessageService Methods: Manage personal or team workspace email and instant messages
• PreferenceService Methods: Manage user preferences stored on the server and leveraged by Oracle Beehive clients
• PresenceService Methods: Manage a user's presence information, subscribe to other user's presence, and view the XMPP roster
• WorkspaceService Methods: Manage personal or team workspaces and their top-level folders

Oracle Beehive from a Terry Olkin Interview:

From the 2009 interview with Terry Olkin (Chief Architect and Senior Vice President of Collaboration Technologies, Oracle), excerpted:

"[...] Oracle Beehive makes available all of the collaborative functionality that people need in a business. For example, it provides immediate accessibility for meeting scheduling, task assignments, and document sharing, and of course e-mail, voice mail, and real-time communications such as instant messaging and Web conferencing. Oracle is putting all those together on an enterprise-class server — enterprise-class not only in terms of scalability and availability but particularly in terms of security and compliance. That's a new approach, and it's the reason we built the product from the ground up, to really emphasize security and compliance...

"Oracle Beehive is the first comprehensive collaborative platform that lets us specify and enforce compliance rules across different ways of communicating. So, for example, I can set up rules about what to do with e-mails after they've been read — how long they stay around, whether they should be archived, when they should be deleted. Oracle Beehive uniquely allows you to specify those policies in one place and enforce them uniformly for all types of communications, whether it's instant messaging, voice transcripts, document manipulation, and so on. This is important for businesses that are dealing with compliance..."

"Oracle Beehive also provides strong security in terms of traditional access control, authentication, authorization, and auditing. Unlike with most collaborative tools, these features aren't add-ons. They're built into Oracle Beehive from the start. Customers can really get control, from a security and compliance perspective, of all their collaborative data and communications. Oracle Beehive uses Oracle Information Rights Management to provide security for documents and communications regardless of where they are located. I don't know of another company out there that has this level of security and compliance built into communications or collaboration products. Oracle is really the leader in this area..."

[About information rights management in Beehive:] " Yes, people also call this digital rights management. It's basically the idea that I can take a piece of content, whether it's a document, an e-mail, or even a piece of music or a video, and protect it no matter where it is. I can, for example, protect a document so that it can only be read but not printed, or it can't be copied or cut and pasted, or even that it should cease to exist after a certain period of time..."

"From an IT perspective, Oracle Beehive provides a uniform and unified platform for collaboration. Now you can replace — with a single product — what would normally take you two, three, even four products. It is easier to administer and install, and it's going to use less power in the data center because it uses fewer servers. That all lowers your total cost of ownership. From a modernization perspective, Oracle Beehive was designed from the ground up to focus on current security and compliance needs and to take into account the explosion of new ways in which people are collaborating. Oracle Beehive doesn't demand a specific user interface. Oracle built the product to be flexible and to give people the choice to use their familiar client products..."

Oracle Beehive Benefits:

Oracle Beehive delivers the only complete and open platform for secure communications and integrated collaboration...

• Secure Communications: Full-featured Web conferencing, instant messaging, e-mail, calendar, and team workspaces based on a unified information model and centralized security
• Integrated Collaboration: Standards-based, hot-pluggable architecture enables organizations to embed collaboration tools into existing business applications and processes
• Increased Security and Compliance: Built-in security including verifiable deletion, auditing, policy management, and encryption
• Lower Total Cost of Ownership: Works with existing collaboration clients and servers on Windows, Linux, and Solaris platforms and can be deployed on premise or through Oracle On Demand

Oracle Beehive: Commentary

• [January 06, 2009] "Oracle Beehive. A New Product Built for the New Ways You Work." By Terry Olkin (Chief Architect and Senior Vice President of Collaboration Technologies, Oracle). From Profit Magazine: The Executive's Guide to Oracle Applications. February 2009 issue. See the excerpt.

• [November 24, 2008] PRO AND CON: The Buzz About Oracle Beehive." By Brian Jackson. From Computerworld Canada. "The enterprise vendor returns to the collaboration space after the 'failure' of OCS 10... the upside and the downside of Beehive... Now Oracle is hoping they've found the collaboration sweet-spot with Beehive. The software doesn't add a new icon to a user's desktop, but rather changes the plumbing behind the enterprise software used on a daily basis. There, it creates a workspace where users can share documents, exchange messages, conference, and make use of social relationship tagging. Beehive is available as both a local program or as a service hosted by Oracle. The license for the on-premises model is $120 per user..."

• [November 10, 2008] "The New flex_ws_api and SOAP 1.2 Example." By Jason Straub. "I can now say that I have tested it with a SOAP 1.2 service and I learned a couple of things. Firstly, when setting the content-type header, the action must appear after the charset declaration or you will get an unsupported media type error from the service. Secondly, there may be an occasion where you have base 64 encoded character data and you want to convert that into binary data, for example, providing the ability to download a document. Based on these two findings, I have updated the flex_ws_api code available below to set the content-type header properly and added a function called clobbase642blob that takes in a base64 encoded clob and returns a blob. The services that I tested with are the Oracle Beehive web services. Oracle Beehive 'is a collaborative environment built on a unique model that combines the various communication and coordination services into a comprehensive platform.' You can test these services via an HTTP interface which came in very handy when I needed to know the structure of the SOAP 1.2 envelope that each service expected. The services that I interacted with were the WorkspaceService to get a list of folders in a workspace and the DocumentService to get a list of documents in a particular folder..."

• [October 27, 2008] "Oracle Hopes for Some Buzz Around Beehive." Staff. From TipAdept. "Software giant Oracle has built what it hopes will be a new home for corporate worker bees... Dubbed Beehive and introduced at Oracle's recent user conference in San Francisco, the new software aims to let employees team up through electronic workspaces as well as calendar, instant messaging and e-mail tools. Beehive is part of a broader push by Oracle into the hot area of employee collaboration, also called Enterprise 2.0. Beehive isn't on the cutting edge in terms of functionality, says Dana Gardner, president of consulting firm Interarbor Solutions. But by centering the system in back-end computer servers rather than relying heavily on software installed on client personal computers, Oracle could woo customers from Microsoft Outlook by offering a simpler, more flexible alternative, Gardner says..."

• [October 2008] Five Ideas: Beehive The Buzz on Oracle's New Collaborative Tool." By Oracle Staff. From Profit Magazine. October 2008. Quotations and testimonials from five sources, including Simon Ellis, EMEA Director of Custom and Product Development, Calsoft Enterprise and Inatech Solutions Limited: "As an organization working in a global delivery model, we needed an efficient and open collaboration framework between locations and time zones. Using Oracle Beehive, we improved project delivery efficiency and cut down on communication / travel costs leading to a increased project margin of more than three percent..."

• [September 28, 2008] "Oracle OpenWorld and Thoughts on Oracle Beehive." By Jason Averbook. Knowledge Infusion Blog. "[...] Oracle OpenWorld... The other major announcement was around Beehive, Oracle's Enterprise 2.0 collaborative toolkit. I have seen many blogs and clips about people saying "nothing new, same old thing compared to Twitter and Facebook". One of the things that people forget is that these tools ARE NOT in most enterprises today and organizations are struggling with how to use them. Oracle's foray into this space is very exciting as one of the way's enterprises will adopt Web 2.0 tools is if they are tightly integrated with their daily business applications. Continue to watch Oracle use similar Beehive technology in its future HR/HCM/Talent Management products which will continue to appeal to the enterprise base...

• [September 26, 2008] "Oracle Beehive Collaborates With Business Processes." By Cliff Saran. From ComputerWeekly.com. "Oracle's introduction of the Beehive enterprise collaboration platform last week promises to give IT departments the ability to collaborate with customers and suppliers more effectively. The product will allow companies to share data between their ERP systems and e-mail, voicemail, instant messaging systems. Companies can use information in these documents to automatically trigger business processes in their ERP software. For example, Beehive could allow a company to automatically capture e-mails from a customer in its customer relationship management system, or capture address details to automatically update a shipping address. Beehive puts Oracle in a similar position to Google, which is attempting to offer end-users an alternative to Microsoft desktop software. Oracle is not the only company forging links between ERP and groupware software. SAP has developed Duet, which bolts on to Outlook to allow staff to use their Outlook contact address book database for CRM and HR tasks... Ray Wang, vice-president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, says, 'Companies with existing collaboration and e-mail-based approaches might consider limited deployments of Beehive.' However, Wang believes Beehive may find a niche in newer companies that have not standardised on Exchange or Domino. People may not be ready to discard their investment in Exchange, but Beehive's built-in security and ability to integrate with enterprise applications using a SOA may convince some IT directors..."

• [September 25, 2008] "Will Oracle's Beehive Sting Microsoft Where It Hurts?" By Dana Gardner. From Linux Insider. "Oracle's announcement of Beehive, its new collaboration suite, signals a shift in enterprise messaging... With Beehive, the next generation of its collaboration suite, Oracle may be sniffing some fresh and meaningful blood in the enterprise messaging waters. The investment Oracle is making in Beehive, announced this week at the massive Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, signals an opportunity born more by the shifting sands beneath Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, than in any new-found performance breakthroughs from Oracle's developers. Exchange and its coterie is widely acknowledged as coming with an agility deficit and at a premium TCO — but with commodity-priced features and functions. For all intents and purposes, e-mail, calendar, files foldering, and even unified messaging functions are free, or at least low-cost features of larger applications function sets or suites. Enterprises are paying gold for copper, when it comes to messaging and groupware. And then they have to integrate it. Oracle recognizes that as enterprises move from high-cost, low-flexibility client-server Exchange to services-based server-based messaging — increasingly extending messaging services in the context of SOA, network services like Cisco's SONA, Web services, and cloud services — they will be looking beyond Exchange..."

• [September 24, 2008] "Oracle's New Beehive: A Shifting Collaboration Paradigm?" By Stewart Mader. Future Changes (Blog). "One of the biggest announcements this week is Oracle Beehive, a new system built from scratch that attempts to tie together multiple communication and collaboration tools within an organization and give teams a central, shared workspace... Here's the kicker: Oracle announced that Beehive will replace its Collaboration Suite tool, which is equivalent to Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange. Does this signal a shift in the collaboration paradigm — away from the 'push' structure of email and toward the 'pull' structure of wikis? Dana Gardner thinks so..."

• [September 24, 2008] "Some Initial Oracle Beehive Impressions and Projections." By Peter O'Kelly. Blog. "Several of the Beehive scenarios described at OpenWorld over the last couple days (in presentation sessions and in discussions at the Oracle Beehive stations in the cavernous OpenWorld exhibit halls) are similar to IBM Lotus Connections in some respects, e.g., attempting to exploit relationships among information items and people, not just basic capabilities such as document libraries and discussions. I definitely got the impression, over the last couple days, that the initial Beehive user experience is just the tip of the iceberg, in terms of fully leveraging the underlying conceptual model... Oracle Beehive's DBMS-based infrastructure is, imho, a leading indicator of likely future communication/collaboration products from IBM, Microsoft, and other vendors. SharePoint is already SQL Server-based, of course, but its object model is not captured in SQL Server in a high-fidelity model mapping today (SharePoint treats SQL Server as more of a property bag manager, and SharePoint doesn't currently use any of the XML management services in SQL Server). Beehive doesn't fully exploit the native XML management capabilities in Oracle Database 11g, however, since Beehive is for relatively lightweight document management (and Oracle's Universal Content Management, designed for more complex content/record/etc. management scenarios, and based on Oracle's Stellent acquisition, also doesn't fully exploit Oracle Database in this context)..." See also: (1) "Oracle Collaboration Suite 10g Product Center: RIP..." ["I was right about the Oracle competitive imperative part, but I was wrong about OCS; the product was quietly retired today today, replaced by Oracle Beehive..."], and (2) "Oracle Buys IP from Tacit to Boost Beehive Platform."

• [September 23, 2008] "Is Oracle Beehive Worth Buzzing About?" By Shayna Garlick. "In a session on Monday [2008-09-22] that went over its allotted time slot as attendees scrambled to ask their questions, Oracle executives Sayan Chakraborty and Terry Olkin explained how the enterprise collaboration software will improve the way organizations communicate and work together. What did they give as Beehive's main advantages? They discussed many — its single point of management, scalability, open platform and security and compliance features like true delete — but really emphasized the workspace feature, which they called the 'pillar concept of Beehive'. Beehive users have both a personal workspace and a team workspace, on which they manage contacts, tasks, calendar, messages, conferencing, documents, Wikis, and instant messages, all from a single point. The application brings all of these content types together and is supported on numerous applications: CalDAV, imap, webdav, xmpp, applemail, outlook, and the iphone, to name a few... But is this something that has been done before? This was the question one session attendee raised, wondering what makes the built-from-scratch Beehive special and different from companies like Microsoft and IBM, who have long been entrenched in collaboration software. Olkin's answer? Beehive plays on Oracle's unique strengths: being 'integrated and secure'. It's not a standalone technology and it leverages the rest of the Oracle ecosystem, he said... Beehive is shipping today — but are all the features included yet? Chakraborty and Olkin answered that everything is available except for web conferencing, which is still in beta and won't be available for a month or two. But beyond that, there is such a long roadmap of features and capabilities that 'Beehive the full product will probably never be done'...."

• [September 23, 2008] "Oracle's Homegrown Push to Out-Collaborate Microsoft." By Ashlee Vance. From New York Times. "Collaboration software is all the rage with companies likeMicrosoft, Google, Cisco Systems, I.B.M. and a host of start-ups. The collaboration tag covers technology that helps employees communicate and work together via a single software set. And that's exactly what Oracle has assembled with Beehive. The new package contains applications for e-mail, voice mail, instant messaging, shared calendars, Web conferencing and shared documents. Mr. Rozwat wasted no time arguing that customers will need to buy far less Oracle collaboration software than comparable Microsoft software if they go with Beehive because Oracle has the better bundle. That said, Oracle has made sure that the various Beehive parts can also work with Microsoft's popular Exchange server and Outlook client software. You know, just in case. One of the Beehive features highlighted by Oracle was something called 'My Workspace,' which can be added to Outlook accounts. This lets people store documents, e-mail, recordings of Web conferences and transcripts of instant message chats in a single place. In addition, Oracle showed off the ways in which security policies for certain workers will remain intact across all of the myriad applications, making sure people only see certain types of files..."

• [September 23, 2008] "OOW2008 Day 2: Oracle Beehive." By Pawel Barut. Software Engineer Thoughts (Blog). "This day started with Keynote presented by Oracle President Charles Phillips. He spoke about Oracle acquisitions, and more complete portfolio of products that Oracle have now. What caught my attention most was announcement of new product, new collaboration platform Oracle Beehive. It joins features of email, calendar, document sharing, web conference and few more in one suite. What is most important those tools are open, so user can use ex. MS Outlook to access mails or calendar entries. Security is one of the key features. When you share document with others, they can see document in theirs workspace. They can even make local copy of this document. When document is deleted by original author, then all copies of the document become unusable for anyone. This is because all shared documents are encrypted and signed. While opening document there is validation of access rights for document. For me it seems as this is based on technology acquired from Stallent. It seems that this product will try to get market from MS Sharepoint and IBM Lotus..."

• [September 23, 2008] "Oracle Beehive: Next Generation of Collaboration Software." By Lucas Jellema. AMIS Blog. "One of the major announcements during Charles Philips' keynote: Oracle Beehive: integrated and secure collaboration platform.The successor to Oracle Collaboration Suite.Targeted at Enterprise Collaboration. And allegedly 'built from scratch in three years'. The demo showed the Outlook Client running against the Beehive server. And not Outlook as we know it — Outlook extended with many collaboration features. Access to Workspaces in which teams collaborate on documents, presentations etc. In a workspace, members have access to joint resources, on line communication (IM/Chat) and on line conferencing. The demo included two clients working in a virtual collaborarion environment — jointly developing a Powerpoint presentation, both making changes. The Beehive software ensure bi-directional synchronization — changes on one client are rapidly synchronized among all members in the workspace... Beehive is open, can be integrated with many different clients (including Outlook) and server components (including Active Directory). It was compared with Lotus Notes - only much more open. Beehive's APIs are standards based (where applicable) and accessible using Java. Beehive wants to address collaboration fragmentation — and challenge the Microsoft offering of Exchange Server, Sharepoint Server and Active Directory..."

• [September 22, 2008] "Oracle Unveils Beehive: Executives Announce Integrated Communications Tool." By Charles Phillips and Chuck Rozwat. ZDNet Videos. 6:22. "Integrated and secure." — At Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco [September 2008], Oracle President Charles Phillips and Chuck Rozwat, the company's executive vice president of product development, announced the release of Beehive. Beehive is an open, integrated communications system that includes instant messaging, video conferencing, and e-mail. They explained that collaboration is a snap when users have all their communications in one system and are still able to use any client or infrastructure..."

• [September 22, 2008] "Oracle Abuzz Over Beehive Collaboration Platform, Other Updates at OpenWorld 2008." By Barney Beal. From SearchOracle.com. "Oracle president Charles Phillips [...] and two members of the Beehive team dressed in black and yellow demonstrated the new [Beehive] platform, with help from Chuck Rozwat, executive vice president of product development. 'Beehive is a brand new product, built from scratch over the last three years — a new architecture, a new set of products,' Rozwat said. 'Beehive is a collaboration server.' Beehive brings together collaboration channels, like email, instant messages and voice mail and coordination activities, like calendaring and joint tasks, into one centrally administered platform. But since email and calendar applications have been around for years, why spend the time and effort, Phillips asked Rozwat. 'You have those things but you also have what looks like a disease — we call it collaboration fragmentation,' Rozwat said. 'They come with their own database, their own way of managing and identifying users and their own management. From an IT standpoint and from a user standpoint, it becomes a nightmare coordinating what you did in IM with email and calendar. What we've done is integrate it together.' Users can run Beehive virtually, narrowing down hundreds of servers required for something like Microsoft Exchange to a handful. And, companies can integrate it with other Oracle products such as the middleware stack for records management or Oracle applications. The announcement met with some skepticism... Beehive can be run from the user's client of choice, such as Microsoft Outlook, a browser or different calendar clients. It also supports third-party identity management applications. For example, users can create workgroups that people are invited to via Outlook and then share content, like recorded messages, PowerPoint presentations or IM sessions, all stored in the same folder system... Beehive also has administration features like universal delete, which allows users to purge content after the team is finished with it. For example, a Microsoft Word document shared among a group can be deleted from the group folder. But it is also encrypted, so anyone who saved the document onto his or her desktop would not be allowed access. Every action is kept in a log file for audit control. Beehive is generally available now at a cost of $120 per user per license..."

• [September 22, 2008] "Oracle's Beehive Buzzes at OracleWorld." By Dawn Kawamoto. From CNET News.com. "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 3-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 here. Beehive seeks to take communication software, from e-mail 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 e-mail loop and will be able to share documents, video, and other materials through Beehive's team workspace feature..."

• [September 22, 2008] " Oracle Collaborates with Beehive." By Michael Krigsman. ZDNet Blog. "Oracle is showcasing its Beehive collaboration platform at OpenWorld. Oracle's collaboration vision underscores the growing importance of enterprise 2.0-style communication products. By highlighting Beehive prominently in president Charles Phillip's keynote, the company adds fuel to the legitimacy of bottom-up, peer-to-peer social networking... It's fascinating to see how concepts behind consumer-oriented applications, such as Twitter and Facebook, are being adapted to the corporate environment. Because Beehive's features and function aren't new, the central theme involves pulling the pieces together into an enterprise-friendly wrapper... Several observers at the conference that I spoke with were ho-hum about Beehive. Paul Greenberg, noted CRM expert and author, commented the Beehive demo wasn't presented well: 'Although Beehive may have advanced features, the demo didn't show anything we haven't seen over the last 4-5 years'... Paul has an open mind about the possibilities for Beehive, but he was concerned that the demo didn't help users understand why the product is truly unique and innovative. In contrast to my view that Beehive offers an interesting glimpse of the future, Dennis Howlett thinks it's primarily a move against Microsoft..."

• [September 22, 2008] "Not Getting Stung By Oracle Beehive." By Roger Smith. From InformationWeek. "One product [at oracle OpenWorld] that immediately caught my eye was the next generation of Oracle Collaboration Suite, Oracle Beehive, which is a marriage of Oracle's familiar Database and Application Servers technologies in a new collaboration suite that provides a range of collaboration services including conferencing, instant messaging, e-mail, calendar, and team workspaces that can be deployed either on premises or in the cloud through Oracle On Demand. Initially introduced on May 8, 2008, the wider Oracle Beehive launch took place the first full day of OpenWorld on Monday, September 22, 2008. Response to the earlier spring Beehive product launch has been both cold and hot... Gartner believes Beehive is unlikely to be any more successful than past efforts. On the other hand, Salim Ansari, head of IT support with the European Space Agency, had a much more positive reaction: 'Oracle Beehive is about to revolutionize the way in which we collaborate and make a lot of the tasks that we take for granted, yet appear to be cumbersome, a lot easier.' Based on those two contradictory responses, I thought I would take a closer look-see by sitting though a few Beehive demos and talking to some Oracle Beehive product managers... Mark Brown, senior director of collaboration business strategy, emphasized that 'Beehive is a new product, not an e-mail platform that's 10 or 15 years old, which allows broader and deeper collaboration than competing products such as Microsoft's SharePoint. It isn't an upgrade to Oracle Collaboration Suite 10.' He said Beehive would be especially useful to companies using other Oracle ERP, Financial, or Telco business apps since users could use high levels of collaboration within their normal workflow... Security is indeed a selling point for Beehive, as I learned from sitting through a product demo with Simon Thorpe, senior solutions consultant, and Andy Peet, Oracle Information Rights Management product manager. Information Rights Management (IRM) is a new form of information security technology that Oracle acquired when it bought SealedMedia and Stellent in 2006..."

• [September 22, 2008] "Oracle Sets World Abuzz Over Oracle Beehive." By Jack Flynn and Tara Swords. Excerpt from the official daily newspaper 'Oracle Magazine and Profit'. "Before a packed crowd of customers and partners, Oracle President Charles Phillips on Monday recapped a year of big accomplishments at Oracle and debuted a new product that is already generating buzz in tech circles. Oracle Beehive, a built-from-scratch collaboration application, gives customers a new way to communicate and work together on projects. For example, Oracle Beehive can tie together e-mail clients, instant messaging and chat programs, calendars, voice mail, and conferencing applications behind the scenes so users can more easily share and simultaneously work on documents, e-mails, and multimedia files... Chuck Rozwat, executive vice president of product development at Oracle, joined Phillips on stage to demonstrate Oracle Beehive in action. The two showed how Oracle Beehive users can add members to collaboration groups, collaborate on a presentation simultaneously, and store files of various types in a shared workspace..."

• [May 14, 2008] "Oracle Jumps Into the Collaboration Market (Again)." By Matthew W. Cain and Jeffrey Mann. Gartner Research. ID Number: G00158030. "[...] On 8 May 2008, Oracle introduced to market Oracle Beehive, an integrated collaboration suite with e-mail/calendar, team workspaces, instant messaging and other collaboration services. The initial release is intended for Oracle Collaboration Suite (OCS) users, with a wider launch expected later in 2008... After two unsuccessful forays into the collaboration market, Oracle is back with the next generation of Oracle Collaboration Suite. Gartner believes Beehive is unlikely to be any more successful than past efforts... It is logical for Oracle to want a piece of the collaboration market. Collaboration services are being increasingly woven into applications, allowing users to collaborate within the context of the business application. In addition, investments in e-mail, for example, can sell other Oracle infrastructure, such as databases and integration tools. Oracle also wants to thwart Microsoft's effort to make Exchange, SharePoint and Office Communications Server the default suite of collaboration services in many companies. A successful collaboration strategy could increase the value of the Oracle business application portfolio via contextual collaboration, lead to add-on product sales and combat Microsoft's hegemonic interests. Oracle Beehive has some attractive characteristics, such as a consistent object model, tags, Outlook support and Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) workflows. But the company faces an uphill battle in the collaboration market. The business e-mail market has not seen a successful new entrant for 15 years, and most companies are well on their way to standardizing on a suite of collaboration services. Oracle has yet to define an unserved market niche for Oracle Beehive and clarify its positioning with respect to the WebCenter Web 2.0 tool, which includes overlapping collaboration capabilities..."

• [May 12, 2008] "Oracle Makes Its 'Enterprise 2.0' Play." By Neil Ward-Dutton. Macehiter Ward-Dutton (MWD) Blog. "Along with an assorted collection of other analysts and journalists, on Friday I sat down for a conversation with Charles Phillips. The invitation to came pretty much out of the blue a couple of weeks ago; the reason was because 'Charles is interested in having a conversation about Web 2.0 trends in the enterprise, and outlining what Oracle's looking to do in that area'... Oracle is relaunching its collaboration offering. The new Oracle Beehive technology is being developed to sit alongside Oracle's existing technology stack as outlined above [Oracle Portal, Oracle Universal Content Management, and WebCenter, together with the underlying Fusion Middleware pieces], and it's not escaped Oracle's attention that if it can make market inroads with an Enterprise 2.0 story, it has a potential follow-on opportunity to displace some of the (very large chunk of) enterprise spending that goes on "heritage" collaboration software product upgrades. The company's Collaboration Suite hardly set the world on fire back in 2002-05: this shows that Oracle is revving up to have another go. But avoiding taking the incumbents on head-on this time..."

• [January 2008] Oracle Enterprise Manager Concepts. 10g Release 4 (10.2.0.4). B31949-07. January 2008. 272 pages. See Chapter 18, "Oracle Beehive Management." — "Oracle Beehive is the next generation of Oracle's enterprise collaboration technologies. Oracle Beehive provides a unified collaboration application and platform comprised of a comprehensive set of integrated, Java-based services, offering a new paradigm for enterprise collaboration solutions. Oracle Beehive provides the full range of collaborative services for enterprise users, including: E-mail, Time management, Instant messaging, Content and document management, Task management, Discussion forums, Voicemail, Mobile device support, Online presence, [and] Contact management... 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, and so on. In Oracle Beehive, there may be one or more server instances, each of which contains one each of all Oracle Beehive services. Therefore a deployment may contain multiple instances of each service: one of each on each server.... A workspace is both a virtual location and a container that provides Oracle Beehive users a place to collaborate, and enables them to create, view, store, access, and manage the artifacts related to their collaborations. From the user perspective, workspaces appear in supported Oracle Beehive clients..."

Initial Contributions to the ICOM TC

This section provides additional documentation on the nine resources nominated by the ICOM TC supporters for initial contribution to the OASIS TC, as declared in the draft charter.

• Oracle Beehive Object Model (BOM)
• Oracle Beehive Release 1.4 Collaboration Service Interface (CSI) Java docs
• Oracle Beehive Organization Work After 2008-08
• DERI Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC)
• Networked Environment for Personalized, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge (NEPOMUK)
• ECOSPACE/BCS
• ECOSPACE Composite Collaborative Services (CoCoS)
• ECOSPACE Distributed Document Context (D2C)
• ECOSPACE Extended SIOC

• Oracle Beehive Object Model (BOM): "The Beehive Object Model (BOM) will be contributed to the TC as the basis for the data model for the integrated collaboration object model." An early reference from the draft charter: Oracle Beehive Object Model (BOM), edited by Terry M. Olkin and Eric S. Chan (Oracle), August 31, 2008. While the draft charter document did not supply a URI for this resource, details were provided in update communications, January 09, 2009 and following.

  Update 2009-01-15: Beehive Object Model. January 12, 2009. Editors: Terry M. Olkin, Eric S. Chan, and Rafiul Ahad (Oracle Corporation). Version 1.0: 01/12/2009. Created for OASIS ICOM TC. Copyright © 2009, Oracle. 83 pages. A proprietary notation is used to define the model. This Beehive Object Model document contains (some of) the information anticipated in contribution #3, Oracle Beehive Organization Work After 2008-08.

  Document overview: "This document describes the object model for Beehive. The document does not attempt to define the model in terms of an actual programming language. Instead, we describe the model using a concise abstract notation. Once we have specified the abstract model, we will be able to define a programming language binding to the model..."

  Section 1.0 (Vocabulary) provides a glossary for all the relevant words that we will use throughout the document. Section 2.0 (Object Formalisms) briefly describes the notations used to define the objects and the relations between them. Section 3.0 (Object Models) defines the objects:

  • Entity
  • Meta-Entity (Entity Schema)
  • Core
    • Attribute and Property
    • Bondable
    • Addressable
    • Lockable
    • Localized String
    • Location
    • Date Time
    • Enumerations
  • Container and Scope
  • Directory
    • User Directory
    • Resource Directory
    • Address Book
    • Presence
    • Free Busy
  • Access Control
  • Particpiant
  • Artifact Management
    • Artifact
    • Artifact Container
    • Artifact Version
    • Artifact Content
  • Metadata Management
    • Template
    • Marker
    • Label
    • Category
    • Bond
  • Preference
  • Workspace
  • Time Management
    • Calendar
    • Task
    • Enumerations
    • Business Hours
    • Timezone
  • Message
    • Unified Message
    • Instant Message
    • Discussion Forum
  • Conference
  • User Subscription and Reminder
    • Subscription
    • Reminder
  • Workflow

• "Beehive Collaboration Service Interface (CSI): An Overview of the CSI Programming Model."

  Excerpt: "The Beehive Collaboration Service Interface (as described in Java docs oracle.csi.controls) is Beehive Server's internal, data access API which is used to develop standards based public interfaces as well as protocol-specific services. In the following sections we provide the overview of the CSI programming components, which include Controls, Entity Handles, Entity Snapshots and Projections, Entity Updaters, Filters/Predicates, and Object Events. The entity classes in CSI Java docs may include the effects of de-normalizations, which are the results of implementation issues. Thus CSI entity classes may not look exactly like the Beehive Object Model (BOM). CSI is provided to OASIS ICOM TC primarily to augment the behavior and operational aspects of the object model. When there is a discrepancy between BOM and CSI entity classes the object model described in Beehive Object Model takes precedence over the CSI entity model in the Java docs.

  Key Concepts of CSI: CSI organizes all the methods available to manipulate entities in BOM into a number of logical groups called controls. Each control provides methods to create, retrieve, update, and delete entities of a specific high level type. For example, there is a control to manipulate workspaces and another to manipulate documents. The Java doc package summary documents the controls available in Beehive. Any application that uses CSI must first decide which controls it needs and then use the control locator to locate and invoke the controls from its execution environment... [Subsequent sections present Control Locator and Controls, Data Access, Access Control, Entity Model, List Filter Predicates, Optimistic Locking, and Object Events.]

  [Earlier: Oracle Beehive Release 1.4 Collaboration Service Interface (CSI) Java docs. "Beehive Release 1.4 Collaboration Service Interface (CSI) Java docs will be contributed to the TC as the basis for the behavior and operations on the objects of the integrated collaboration object model." The draft charter document did not initially supply a URI for this resource; URI supplied 2009-01-28.]

• Oracle Beehive Organization Work After 2008-08: "Any work performed by Oracle Beehive Organization between August 2008 and the start of the work of the ICOM TC" [will be contributed to the ICOM TC]. A communication from Eric Chan clarifies that the "work" is represented (at least in part) by the January 12, 2009 version of the Oracle Beehive Object Model (BOM).

• SIOC: DERI Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC) will be contributed to the ICOM TC as the basis for refining, enriching, and extending the data model for the integrated collaboration object model.

  "The SIOC Initiative (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) aims to enable the integration of online community information. SIOC provides a Semantic Web ontology for representing rich data from the Social Web in RDF. It has recently achieved significant adoption through its usage in a variety of commercial and open-source software applications, and is commonly used in conjunction with the FOAF vocabulary for expressing personal profile and social networking information. By becoming a standard way for expressing user-generated content from such sites, SIOC enables new kinds of usage scenarios for online community site data, and allows innovative semantic applications to be built on top of the existing Social Web. The SIOC ontology was recently published as a W3C Member Submission, which was submitted by sixteen (16) organisations..."

  References:

  • "The SIOC Initiative web site
  • SIOC FAQ document
  • SIOC Wiki
  • SIOC-Dev Discussion List
  • SIOC Core Ontology Specification. 14-July-2008 or later.
  • SIOC: Content Exchange and Semantic Interoperability Between Social Networks. By John G. Breslin, Uldis Bojars, Alexandre Passant, Sergio Fernández, and Stefan Decker. Paper presented at the W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking, 15-16 January 2009, Barcelona, Spain.
  • Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC) Ontology Submission Request to W3C
    • SIOC Core Ontology Specification
    • SIOC Ontology: Applications and Implementation Status
    • SIOC Ontology: Related Ontologies and RDF Vocabularies
    • Snapshots of Namespace Documents in RDFS/OWL (ZIP Archive)

• NEPOMUK: NEPOMUK [Networked Environment for Personalized, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge] will be contributed to the ICOM TC as the basis for refining, enriching, and extending the data model for the integrated collaboration object model.

  NEPOMUK Ontologies. Task-Force Ontologies: "The vision of the Social Semantic Desktop defines a user's personal information environment as a source and end-point of the Semantic Web: Knowledge workers comprehensively express their information and data with respect to their own conceptualizations. Semantic Web languages and protocols are used to formalize these conceptualizations and for coordinating local and global information access. The Resource Description Framework serves as a common data representation format. We identified several additional requirements for high-level knowledge representation on the social semantic desktop. With a particular focus on addressing certain limitations of RDF, we engineered a novel representational language akin to RDF and the Web Ontology Language, plus a number of other high-level ontologies. Together, they provide a means to build the semantic bridges necessary for data exchange and application integration on distributed social semantic desktops. Although initially designed to fulfill requirements for the NEPOMUK project, these ontologies are useful for the semantic web community in general..."

  "NEPOMUK aims at empowering individual knowledge workers to better exploit their personal information space and to maintain fruitful communication and exchange within social networks across organizational boundaries. NEPOMUK brings together researchers, industrial software developers, and representative industrial users, to develop a comprehensive solution for extending the personal desktop into a collaboration environment which supports both the personal information management and the sharing and exchange across social and organizational relations. This solution is called the Social Semantic Desktop...

• ECOSPACE/BCS: ECOSPACE will contribute Ecospace Reference Architecture: Basic Collaborative Services, Version 1.0 [Edited by the ECOSPACE Consortium], September 2008.

  The ECOSPACE project "is developing, based on emerging trends, an Interoperable collaborative working environment (ICWE) for eProfessionals in the domains of eResearch (online communities of researchers), ePublishing, eConsulting, eGovernment, eInnovation (Living Labs stakeholders) and almost everywhere professionals are applying eCollaboration. A CWE reference architecture as well as a large set of collaboration services and tools are developed or enhanced for constituting an interoperable collaborative environment. Some of the used concepts have already been contributed to standards (W3C)..."

  ECOSPACE pursues the vision that by 2012 every Professional in Europe is empowered for seamless, dynamic and creative collaboration across teams, organisations and communities through a personalised collaborative working environment. ECOSPACE has four main objectives: (1) The definition of innovative work paradigms through the analysis of eProfessionals and their related organisation. (2) The design and development of an open standards, service-oriented architecture for complementary and alike systems. (3) A collaboration upperware and services to enable seamless and instant collaboration among knowledge workers in group forming networks, beyond organisational boundaries. (4) The creation of new tools that simplify the complexity of collaboration in dynamic work environments and which enable users for creative and knowledge intensive tasks..."

  Basic Collaborative Services (BCS) are "part of the ECOSPACE reference architecture, which correspond to the foundational layer and supported by any CWE that wishes to be ECOSPACE compliant. According to the ECOSPACE reference architecture, a basic service is defined as a simple collaborative task that cannot be further divided into smaller tasks. This atomicity qualifies the Basic Collaborative Services as the smallest building block of the ECOSPACE reference architecture. Another foundational characteristic is that the BCS distil the base common functionality of any CWE, thus they are instantiated in different forms in each platform...

  ECOSPACE contacts: Wolfgang Prinz (ECOSPACE Project Coordinator, from Fraunhofer FIT, Sankt Augustin, Germany; wolfgang.prinz@fit.fraunhofer.de) and Marc Pallot (ECOSPACE Network and Communication, from ESoCE-NET, Paris, France).

  References:

  • ECOSPACE project web site
  • ECOSPACE project wiki
  • ECOSPACE Overview
  • ECOSPACE/Consortium
  • ECOSPACE Interoperable Collaborative Working Environment (ICWE)
  • Open Collaborative Architecture Working Group (OCA WG) — ECOSPACE project is the WG lead

• ECOSPACE Composite Collaborative Services (CoCoS): ECOSPACE Newsletter Number 4: "Both social and economic changes have favoured the appearance of eProfessionals as workers whose business and tasks can only be achieved using modern cooperative technologies. With the aim of providing these eProfessionals with the necessary elements in theirs system, there is a need of researching and developing new Collaborative Working Environments (CWEs) that improve the different activities of the eProfessionals. This is the main goal of the ECOSPACE project... In the Composite Collaborative Service (CoCoS) layer, we combine basic/atomic services to build composite functionalities or orchestration of services...

  "In several collaborative working environments, the definition of complex tasks is required. These tasks may involve the execution of several Basic Collaborative Services. More concretely, in the architecture these complex tasks are covered in the CoCoS layer. What is more, CoCoS may use also existing CoCoS to describe a more complex task. For example, in the case of Upload Document and Notify CoCoS, the process of notification is done using the NotifyUsers CoCoS. Regarding the NotifyUsers CoCoS, it uses the PresenceAndAvailability, Context Information, InstantMessaging, Directory and E-mail services. First, this CoCoS gets the users' status, and for those users who have online status and have a rule indicating that they prefer to be notified by IM, the CoCoS sends the notification by IM. Otherwise, the notification is sent using e-mail, considering the information stored in the OpenLDAP server. The second scenario, Upload Document and Notify CoCoS uses the ContentManagement service and the NotifyUsers CoCoS. Thus, the first step in this CoCoS is uploading a document in the system and then executing the NotifyUsers CoCos...not only does the CoCos Layer use the Basic Service Layer but it also makes use of the Semantic Layer by means of the users' context rules. With the aim of making available the CoCoS to users, we have developed a graphical user interface (GUI) using the AJAX ZK framework. In this way, the application shows a set of forms to retrieve the necessary information for the execution of the CoCoS..."

• ECOSPACE Distributed Document Context (D2C): ECOSPACE Newsletter Number 6, by Michael Vonrueden: "One of the foundations of cooperative work is the exchange of documents and files between groups or cooperation-partners. Email, Instant-Messaging, Document Management Systems and Shared Workspaces are just a few of manifold methods and tools for file exchange between two or more persons. Cooperation requires the transfer of files (e.g. by email) between two or more systems. Every transfer of a document implies almost the complete loss of context- and meta-information, such as history-data that is bound to the document and cannot be reconstructed automatically by the remote cooperation-partner. Regardless of the former metadata and context of a document, each time a document crosses a system-border (e.g. a cooperative document management system) it leads to the consequence that a new document-context has to be established by the receiving cooperation partner. With focus on cooperative working environments (CWE), the following will introduce a concept of a general architecture for a persistent binding between distributed contexts, the related metadata and documents in cooperative working-scenarios...

  The requirement for a system-independent document-context requires the availability of metadata at all times and all places. Further it is necessary to standardize the metadata for a wide adoption and usage of the context information. As a general requirement the ECOSPACE-Project is a good environment to standardize metadata that is provided by systems and the assembled context-information of a document... We believe that the presented concept outlines a new approach for distributed document-contexts that can bind a context persistent to a document, without a static relation to this information. Moreover the context-information is part of a whole scope and is therefore an assembly of dynamic and variable systems that provide specialized context-information for a particular document within a cooperative working environment..."

• ECOSPACE Extended SIOC: "Towards Shared Workspace Interoperability," from ECOSPACE Newsletter Number 6: "Nowadays, almost everyone use shared workspaces for sharing a wide range of objects from simple photos and images up to more complex documents. Such Shared Workspace (SW) platforms support a wide variety of collaboration functionalities such as document management, versioning, project blogging, shared todo lists or calendars just to cite a few. In many organisations SW platforms providing these functionalities like MS-Sharepoint, BSCW, Business Collaborator, or Netweaver are already successfully implemented. However, cooperation processes occur not only within a single organisation but more and more between various organisations that are involved in common projects...

  The CWE Interoperability Architecture provides a middleware that enables multiple, independent CWE platforms and third-party applications to share and correlate data, based on SIOC... Firstly, CWE data is exported as SIOC data. Then the SIOC data is imported by other CWEs or by third-party applications. Finally the SIOC data is utilized accordingly. The CWE Interoperability Architecture based on SIOC necessitate four elements (1) Concept Mapping: The first stage of translating proprietary CWE data into SIOC RDF data involves mapping concepts that exist in a specific CWE domain to concepts in the SIOC ontology. (2) SIOC Exporter: Based on the conceptual mappings, SIOC exporters translate platform-specific data into SIOC RDF data. (3) Workspace Synchronization Web Service: The workspace synchronization web service exposes the content of a CWE workspace as SIOC data to external systems. CWE items, such as documents and folders, may be accessed, added, deleted, renamed, or replaced remotely via these services. (4) SIOC Importer/Viewer: Importing remote SIOC data into a CWE allows a user to view data from a remote SIOC RDF source as if it was a local folder in the CWE. The SIOC Importer/Viewer reverts the SIOC data into CWE platform-specific data, based on the conceptual mapping...

OASIS ICOM TC Charter and Call for Participation

This content is adapted and updated from the complete text of the draft charter published January 05, 2009 and final charter/CFP published January 30, 2009:

Contents

• 1. Normative Information
  • 1a. Name
  • 1b. Statement of Purpose
  • 1c. Scope
  • Upwards Compatibility
  • Test Suite
  • Out of Scope
  • 1d. Deliverables
  • Exit Criteria
  • Maintenance
  • 1e. IPR Mode
  • 1f. Anticipated Audience
  • 1g. Language
• 2. Non-Normative Information Regarding the Startup of the Technical Committee
  • 2a. Related and Similar Work
  • 2b. First Meeting
  • 2c. Ongoing Schedule
  • 2d. TC Supporters
  • 2e. TC Convenor
  • 2f. OASIS Member Section
  • 2g. Anticipated Contributions
  • 2h. Draft FAQ Document
  • 2i. Specification Working Title
  • References

OASIS Integrated Collaboration Object Model for Interoperable Collaboration Services (ICOM) Technical Committee

Analyst Groups: Convergence of Communication, Collaboration, Content

The Burton Group's "Collaboration and Content" blog (Craig Roth, Service Director) frequently refers to communication, collaboration, and content as the "(3C) technologies" supported by 3C products. Other analyst groups have made observations and predictions since 2005 about the convergence of these three technologies — including both synchronous and asynchronous (unified) communications, for both extranet and corporate intranet. Excerpts from some of the analyst groups' publications:

• Root Document Communication, Collaboration, and Content: Compelling Convergence. Collaboration and Content Strategies Overview. Burton Group Report. By Peter O'Kelly, with contributions from Mike Gotta, Guy Creese, and Karen Hobert. May 15, 2006. See also the announcement. "Communication, collaboration, and content management are increasingly mission-critical in both organizational and personal contexts. Unfortunately, related software offerings have often had limited success. Software products targeting collaboration and content haven't been broadly successful, and communication software, especially e-mail, has recently degenerated into a mix of spam and security challenges. A new model is emerging, with a focus on channels for communication, workspaces for collaboration, and virtually unified content management. The new model also seeks to maximize the extent to which users and developers can communicate and collaborate in context, thereby staying focused on real-world activities instead of technologies and tools. In this document, Research Director Peter O'Kelly outlines the past, present, and future of communication, collaboration, and content management software, and explains emerging opportunities."

  Jamie Lewis, Burton Group CEO and Research Chair (in the announcement): "The lines between communication, content, and collaboration technologies are blurring rapidly. Convergence holds both potential risk and reward for today's enterprises. On one hand, powerful new tools will enable 'virtual' enterprises to work with employees, partners, suppliers, and customers in new and exciting ways. On the other hand, convergence can lead to turf battles as previously distinct telecommunications and e-mail organizations come to grips with these technologies. And enterprises must make the right technology bets to avoid costly mistakes. We have assembled a team of highly respected industry analysts to provide practical research that our enterprise clients can use to build their solutions."

• The Forrester Wave: Collaboration Platforms. Forrester Research Report. By Erica Driver. May 24, 2006. "Collaboration platforms are not the end game. Information Workplaces are now emerging. Moving forward, collaboration features will be delivered by Information Workplace platforms, which will deliver unified content, collaboration, portal, and office productivity tools. Information Workplace platforms are emerging to support all types of information workers (e.g., traditional office workers, people who work with people, and people who work with the physical world) with a digital workplace that is seamless, visual, contextual, guided, role-based, multimodal, and aware of the physical world. Users will access myriad forms of enterprise information via Information Workplaces that run on various devices and platforms... The Information Workplace will be much simpler, yet richer, than today's tools by incorporating contextual, role-based information from business systems, applications, and processes; delivering voice, documents, rich media, process models, business intelligence, and real-time analytics; integrating just-in-time eLearning; and fostering collaboration. Using a service-oriented architecture, the Information Workplace will be rich with presence awareness, information rights, and personalization, and it will provide offline and online support to a plethora of devices. As this unfolds, information work will expand beyond traditional knowledge workers..."

• Industry Developments and Models: The Enterprise Workplace: How It Will Change the Way We Work. IDC Opinion. By Brian McDonough, Robert P. Mahowald, Joshua Duhl, Alison Crawford, Mark Levitt, Susan Feldman, and Evan Quinn. Filing Information: February 2005, IDC #32919, Volume 1. [IDC Corporate Headquarters: 5 Speen Street, Framingham, MA 01701 USA, +1.508.872.8200] "IDC believes that a new user work environment will emerge in the next five years that will be supported by a new, unified, modular enterprise software stack. This "enterprise workplace" will dramatically improve interactions across applications and between workers. The change will be driven in equal parts by users who are tired of scrambling to adapt to a multitude of interfaces, formats, and compatibility issues and by vendors that are cognizant of this need and see in the enterprise workplace an opportunity to differentiate their products. According to today's user paradigm, task or role-based requirements — such as searching for information, collaborating, managing projects, and managing customer relationships — commonly require separate interfaces that draw information from isolated repositories, each with its own business logic and workflow. IDC believes that enterprise IT is ripe for change. The enterprise workplace has begun to emerge as an amalgamation of technologies and solutions offered by a variety of vendors from several different functional markets. Solution providers are beginning to produce more intuitive and unified platforms, user interfaces, and applications, although not all of the necessary pieces have been completed or even conceived. Vendors and other solution providers that wish to participate in the enterprise workplace should consider the following [...] Focus on users and task-based computing by hiding complexity, allowing workers to concentrate on tasks rather than on the manipulation of multiple applications to find and use information and functionality..." [See also from Enterprise Workplace]

• Understanding Contextual Collaboration. Gartner Research Report. ID Number: G00129257. By Matthew W. Cain. October 03, 2005. "Business demands are driving collaboration services to be integrated into business process applications Many factors (such as externalization and globalization, employee virtualization and the 'consumerization' of IT) are creating a dynamic market for collaboration tools. Driven by the need to promote business efficiencies (internally, with partners and customers), organizations are reaping benefits by deploying tools that enable people to clarify, negotiate, teach, plan, manage and brainstorm within the context of business processes ... Contextual collaboration represents an addition to the traditional model of implementing a suite of collaboration tools independent of business processes. During the next few years, with integration of collaborative services an integral component of business functions, companies will be able to shorten sales cycles, accelerate product development, generate..."

ICOM TC News and Updates

• [March 27, 2009] "Integrated Collaboration Object Model (ICOM)." Conference session. Presentation by Eric S. Chan (Consulting Member of Technical Staff, Oracle Corporation) and Stefan Decker (Professor, Digital Enterprise Research Institute [DERI], National University of Ireland, Galway). 2009 Semantic Technology Conference. Wednesday, June 17, 2009. Time: 07:30 AM - 08:20 AM. Summary: "Organizations today need to integrate contextual collaboration within end-to-end business processes, such as customer relationship management, performance, and project management. To remain competitive in the global knowledge communities and market places, the organizations need to enable tomorrow's information workers to collaborate across organizational boundaries with external parties. Given the large number of components involved in a complete and integrated collaboration environment, we need an integrated object model to eliminate impedance and promote seamless and natural transitions between components. A standard integrated and complete collaboration model is essential also for tools, business applications, Web 2.0, and Semantic Web 3.0 applications developers to write to the industry standard model, API, and protocol to interoperate with integrated collaboration environments across different communities. OASIS Integrated Collaboration Object Model for Interoperable Collaboration Services Technical Committee will standardize the collaboration objects and ontology for a wide range of collaboration activities to facilitate interoperable integrated collaboration environments in the global network communities. In this talk, we will present the works of the OASIS ICOM TC." About SemTech: "Now in its fifth year, the annual SemTech Conference represents virtually the entire spectrum of business, government, and consumer activity taking place within the emerging field of semantic technologies. It is the most extensive event ever assembled on the topic."

• [March 11, 2009] Mapping ICOM and CMIS Abstract Models: Liaison between OASIS CMIS TC and OASIS ICOM TC. Presentation prepared by Eric S. Chan, Chair of the OASIS ICOM TC. Per the posting: "I am initiating the liaison between CMIS and ICOM technical committees to leverage each other's technologies. I have attached the slides describing the ICOM TC Charter and potential mappings between ICOM and CMIS abstract models...." Excerpt from the prose portion of the presentation (see UML model diagrams for details): "ICOM TC Charter Scope is to (1) specify the normative standards for collaboration objects, along with their attributes, relationships, constraints, and behavior, and (2) to specify the non-normative guidelines (providing architectures or use-case scenarios) for a new workspace-oriented protocol for shared workspaces that support a full range of collaboration activities. [However] the detail bindings of ICOM abstract model to any specific programming languages and over-the-wire protocols will be handled through separate related TCs... Mappings between ICOM and CMIS: ICOM abstract model can define standard object types in CMIS. ICOM calendar, task list, forum, topic, address book, conference, and trash can define standard folder types in CMIS ICOM document, unified message, instant message, wiki page, contact, calendar occurrence, calendar invitation, task to do, task assignment, etc., can define standard document types in CMIS ICOM subscription, reminder, workflow, and access control can define standard policy types in CMIS ICOM n-nary bond can represent a group of 1-1 relationships in CMIS... The proposed ICOM entity is a tuple with a globally unique ID and an optional name. Virtually all ICOM objects are entities, some of which can map to CMIS Folder, Document, Policy, and Relationship objects. Access to every entity is controlled through an access control policy. Each entity can have zero or more markers, subscriptions, reminders, and bonds associated with it... ICOM Marker: ICOM Marker (includes Tag/Label and Category) needs a counterpart in CMIS — new object type in CMIS? [...]" Document source: .PPT, archive.

Principal References

• OASIS ICOM TC Resources:
  • OASIS Integrated Collaboration Object Model for Interoperable Collaboration Services (ICOM) TC public home page
  • ICOM TC Charter
  • ICOM TC Members
  • Obligated members
  • TC Discussion List Archive
  • Comment List Archive
  • ICOM TC Public Documents (Kavi)
• ICOM TC and Oracle Beehive Announcements:
  • Draft Charter Proposal: OASIS Integrated Collaboration Object Model for Interoperable Collaboration Services (ICOM) Technical Committee. January 05, 2009. The Convenor Call was scheduled for Friday, 23-January-2009, at 10-11 AM EST (7-8 AM PST / 3-4 PM Dublin).
  • Oracle Launches Oracle Beehive. Delivers the Only Complete and Open Platform for Integrated and Secure Collaboration." Oracle Announcement. Oracle OpenWorld, San Francisco. September 22, 2008. Alt URI. See also the Oracle OpenWorld 2008 demo sessions. [Source]
  • Customers and Partners Buzzing About Oracle Beehive. Oracle Announcement. Oracle OpenWorld, San Francisco. September 22, 2008. [Source]
  • "Oracle Announces Oracle Beehive Next-Generation Enterprise Collaboration Platform." Oracle Information InDepth Newsletters. Content Management Edition. November 10, 2008.
  • "Oracle Buys Intellectual Property Assets of Tacit Software. Enhances Oracle Beehive with Expertise Location Capabilities." Oracle Announcement. November 03, 2008. "Oracle plans to integrate Tacit Software into Oracle Beehive, a secure, integrated, standards-based enterprise collaboration platform."
  • "Oracle OpenWorld 2008 — Beehive Q&A. Webcast. Live from OpenWorld on September 22, 2008. Video link, trackback URI.
• Oracle Beehive Key URIs:
  • Oracle Beehive. Main reference page from Oracle Technology Network.
  • Oracle Beehive Overview
  • Oracle Beehive Object Model (BOM)
  • Podcast. "Oracle Beehive for Complete, Open and Integrated Collaboration." MP3.
  • Oracle Beehive: Supported Standards and Protocols
• Oracle Beehive Technical Information and Reference Documentation:
  • Oracle Beehive [1.4] Feature List. Oracle Beehive 1.4.3 (2009-01-12) or later.
  • Oracle Beehive Collaboration Platform.
  • Oracle Beehive Release 1 (1.4). Published: December 23, 2008. See the generic URI.
  • Oracle Beehive Concepts. Also in PDF. "Overview of Oracle Beehive: This module provides an overview of several high-level concepts and challenges related to enterprise collaboration, and discusses how Oracle Beehive addresses these challenges from the conceptual and feature perspectives..."
  • Oracle Beehive Deployment Guide. Also in PDF format. Includes the Oracle Beehive Architecture description.
  • Oracle Beehive End-User Information for Release 1 (1.4). Also in PDF format. "Oracle Beehive supports a number of open standards and protocols, enabling organizations to deploy and integrate commonly-available or custom applications to access Oracle Beehive data and leverage its robust feature set."
  • Oracle Beehive Application Developer's Guide. Also in PDF format. Oracle Beehive Platform Services provides you with the following tools that allow you to integrate Oracle Beehive into your applications: (1) Oracle Beehive Workflow Service enables you to integrate Oracle Beehive with BPEL processes; (2) Oracle Beehive API allow you to retrieve and manipulate data from Oracle Beehive and integrate it into custom and third party applications, which users may execute on remote systems...
  • Oracle Beehive Java Content Repository Java API Reference. "The Java Content Repository (JCR) API is a standard programmatic interface for content repositories, in this case, the Oracle Beehive repository. Clients using the JCR API can read content from and write content to the repository and take advantage special features provided by the repository such as versioning and locking. As a result, you can develop applications independent of the underlying repository architecture..."
  • Oracle Beehive Administrator's Guide. Describes administration tasks associated with Oracle Beehive. The Oracle Beehive Administrator's Guide is directed at any administrator whose task is the installation, deployment, configuration, administration, and maintenance of Oracle Beehive." Also in PDF format.
  • Oracle Beehive Administrator's Reference Guide. Release 1 (1.4), Part Number E13798-02. Describes administration tasks associated with Oracle Beehive. Oracle Beehive XML File Reference, Command Line Utility, Error Codes, Parameter Reference. Also in PDF format.
  • Oracle Beekeeper Online Help. "Oracle Beekeeper is a Web-based application that allows you to manage your Oracle Beehive deployment using an intuitive, user-friendly interface. Using Oracle Beekeeper, you can provision users, view your deployment topology, set role definitions, manage Oracle Beehive services, and administer many other aspects of your Oracle Beehive deployment." Also in PDF format.
  • Installation Guide for Linux (PDF). Also for Microsoft Windows (PDF) and Solaris (PDF).
  • Oracle Beehive Release Notes. Release 1 (1.4). Part Number E13790-06. Also available in PDF format.
  • Oracle Beehive Licensing Information. Also available in PDF format.
• Oracle Beehive Samples (Documented Examples):
  • AddressBookService Example
  • CalendarService Example
  • ConferenceService Example
  • DeviceService Example
  • DiscussionForumService Example
  • DocumentService Example
  • FolderService Example
  • GeneralArtifactService Example
  • GroupService Example
  • MembershipService Example
  • MessageService Example
  • PreferenceService Example
  • PresenceService Example
  • WorkspaceService Example
• Oracle Beehive Sample Code
  • Web Services. Oracle Beehive Release 1 [1.4] Basic Web Services Samples.
  • Web Services Security. "This page describes how to configure Oracle Beehive for SAML authentication and how to develop Oracle Beehive Web Services clients that use SAML authentication. Oracle Beehive Web services supports SAML sender-vouches and SAML holder-of-key authentication methods."
  • Oracle Beehive Release 1 (1.4) Java Content Repository API. "Oracle Beehive Release 1 (1.4) Java Content Repository (JCR) API implements the Content Repository API for Java Technology specification — Java Specification Request 170, version 1.0. The Content Repository API is a common, standardized Java interface for content repositories. With the Oracle Beehive JCR API, you may access and manipulate an Oracle Beehive instance?s workspaces and its data like a content repository."
  • BPEL Workflow. Oracle Beehive Custom Workflow Tutorial. "Oracle Beehive supports user-defined BPEL workflows that can either be invoked automatically from Oracle Beehive through policies or from some external source. You can integrate Oracle Beehive with BPEL Human Tasks so that these tasks show up in Oracle Beehive as task assignments. This tutorial demonstrates how to define a BPEL process that is invoked from Oracle Beehive and leverages task integration..."
• Oracle By Example (OBE). Provides hands on, step-by-step instructions for Administrator and End-User tasks in Oracle Beehive. Examples:
  • Getting Started
  • Configuring IMAP, SMTP, XMPP
  • Configuration for Pidgin
• Oracle Beehive Product Information:
  • Oracle Beehive: The Future of Collaboration. An Oracle White Paper. September 19, 2008. 12 pages.
  • Oracle Beehive Business White Paper. Oracle Beehive business benefits for the enterprise. September 2008. 11 pages.
  • Oracle Beehive Data Sheet. September 19, 2008. Oracle Beehive feature offerings.
  • Oracle Beehive Mobility Data Sheet. Beehive Mobile Services.
  • "Oracle Beehive: Integrated Platform for Higher Education and Research Collaboration." Data Sheet. 2 pages.
• Oracle Beehive Software:
  • Online Beehive Demo
  • Oracle Beehive Complimentary 30-Day Trial. License fee (thereafter): $120.00 USD.
  • Oracle Beehive Downloads. As of 2009-01-05: Oracle Beehive Server Release 1 (1.4.3.0.0), download for Linux x86, Windows, and Solaris. Oracle Beekeeper Release 1 (1.4.3.0.0), also for for Linux x86, Windows, and Solaris.
  • Oracle Technology Network Community (Forum). Category: Beehive. Discussion of best practices tips and information; participants include other Oracle Beehive implementers and developers.
  • Oracle Beehive Mobile Interop Lab