Oracle Collaboration Suite

Provide your employees with integrated tools to improve productivity and start managing information like a real corporate asset. What if your Web conferencing, content management, email, voicemail and calendar applications all worked together - with the ability to store and search information using the power of the Oracle Database? Give employees the tools they need to communicate anywhere using any device, in real time.

Oracle Collaboration Suite lets you:

Oracle Collaboration Suite News

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For more information about the Oracle Database 10g, please contact us either by telephone on 7122971/2/3, or by email at marketing@stl-horizon.com

Oracle Collaboration Suite Scales to 50,000 users/hour

Oracle Collaboration Suite achieved outstanding performance on a series of scalability tests run on Sun Microsystems servers. Oracle Collaboration Suite's email solution, the focus of the performance tests, scaled from 5,000 to more than 52,000 users and more than 500,000 emails per hour.

This three-tier performance result was achieved using Sun Fire midrange servers. The results demonstrated near-linear scalability on all Sun servers with Oracle Database and Application Server. Users and their identities were centrally stored in Oracle Internet Directory, the core component of Oracle's Identity Management solution.

As a result of the joint testing, customers can now more accurately size their e-mail consolidation solutions using Sun and Oracle's on-line sizing tool, while obtaining advanced scalability, functionality, reliability, and lower cost of ownership for their vital e-mail services.

Oracle Collaboration Suite on Sun systems provides a single e-mail message store for small, medium and large size companies, and includes non-disruptive back up by switching files to another node during server maintenance, so users have access to mission critical content 24/7.

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The World's Largest Commercial Database Runs Oracle

The 2003 Winter Corporation Top Ten Survey provides independent third-party validation that Oracle scales to the highest level of performance. The survey confirms Oracle is the leading database for transaction processing and decision support in real-world customer environments:

The 2003 Winter Corporation Top Ten Survey identifies the world's leading database implementations based on Database Size and Most Rows/Records. As part of the rigorous survey process, respondents must have a validated database size that meet the survey's requirements.

Winter surveyed Oracle customers from 20 countries on 5 continents, in industries from telecommunications and government, to healthcare and banking; Oracle customers comprised 50% of the validated Top Ten Survey respondents.

All customer respondents were required to complete the Winter Corporation Top Ten Survey and validate their entry by running the SQL Validation Script against their production system. The SQL Script Validation output must report a database size greater than one terabyte for Unix/Mainframe and greater than 500GB for Windows to be accepted by Winter Corporation. Winter Corporation defines database size as user data plus indices. Source: Winter Corporation, http://www.wintercorp.com

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Computer Business Review Online: Collaborate or Suffocate

In the modern business world, no one is an island. Everybody needs to be able to communicate, and as efficiently as possible. That is the message coming from the major collaboration software vendors, who are seeking to make every worker better connected and more productive, no matter where they are. Mobility is a key issue in terms of access-anywhere email, email for deskless workers, and email from wireless devices.

Because of this, web-based access and mobile device access are now built-in components of all major messaging suites. For example, Microsoft, which had sold Mobile Information Server as a distinct product, has bundled most of the software's key features into Exchange Server 2003, which was released earlier this year. Oracle's latest Collaboration Suite allows users to select which emails are forwarded to their mobile phones. IBM's Lotus Domino Everyplace, now on version 6.0, lets people access email and calendars from any phone or personal digital assistant (PDA) equipped with a microbrowser.

The productivity benefits of being able to access messages of all kinds while not at your desk are so obvious that they almost go without saying. But in an August white paper, Nokia tried to put together some estimates to illustrate, in dollar terms, what kind of productivity return on investment could be achieved if a mobile workforce is also a connected workforce.

A hypothetical company, Nokia says, has 100 employees who cost about $33.85 each per hour to employ and are on the road for an average of two days a month. Those employees could work, catching up on email and such from their mobile devices, for two hours that they would not ordinarily have been able to because they were sitting in an airport lounge or on a train. That equates to productivity gains of $160,000 a year, Nokia estimates. And that is before the same hypothetical company's squads of 'road warriors' and home workers are factored in.

But keeping employees busy while on the road is not just all about penny-pinching corporations trying to squeeze more work hours out of already overstretched and overstressed workers. From the user's perspective, it can be about fitting in work time while travelling, in order to meet deadlines and not have to put in the extra hours to catch up.

Microsoft's product manager for Exchange Server 2003 in the UK, Allister Frost, says he finds his new-found ability to work on the go to be a boon. "Mobility allows you to have a much less rigid concept of what work time is. It allows you to adapt your work time to suit yourself."

Microsoft has addressed mobility in Exchange 2003, allowing users to access and synchronise their email with mobile devices using WAP 2.x and XHTML, as well as Windows-based devices such as Smartphones and Pocket PCs. These can be used to access calendaring and scheduling and contacts books through a familiar Outlook-style interface.

But in a depressed spending environment, companies are not willing to throw money after technological bells and whistles. Collaboration software vendors have to make a convincing ROI case too. Microsoft wants to convince buyers that this time around, with Exchange 2003, they can reduce their costs when compared to their current Exchange 5.5 deployments. The realisation of the productivity benefits that can emerge from added features such as mobile access comes later, say executives.

Microsoft knew that it had to offer a compelling ROI story with Exchange 2003, after the prospect of a potentially costly migration from version 5.5 to Exchange 2000 left many companies reluctant to part with the upgrade cash.
"Server consolidation is the big thing customers are looking for," says Nigel Postings from Microsoft's UK consulting team. "In the past, when companies have grown fast through mergers and acquisitions, they expanded with more 5.5 servers... Now we're living in a new world and they want to consolidate for cost savings."

"We are seeing some customers skip Exchange 2000 and go straight to Exchange 2003," says Postings. The company estimates that somewhere between 40% and 60% of Exchange 5.5 users decided against upgrading to Exchange 2000, but other industry watchers put the estimate at nearer to 70%.

The big obstacle to moving from 5.5 to 2000 was mainly one of implementation – Exchange 5.5 on NT had its own built-in data repository, whereas 2000 leveraged Active Directory. Migrating user data from one to the other was seen by some as unnecessarily costly and complex when balanced against the perceived benefits of upgrading to Exchange 2000.

But Microsoft thinks it has solved the problem with the 2003 edition, with the introduction of better migration tools, including wizards designed to simplify the process of moving users to Active Directory from Exchange 5.5.

Active Directory Migration Tool (ADMT) 2.0 and the Active Directory Connector (ADC) were introduced this year to help with Exchange 2003 uptake. ADMT helps with the planning and implementation of an orderly directory migration by analysing the 5.5 repository's topology and making configuration recommendations. The ADC allows the 5.5 directory and Active Directory to coexist, to reduce downtime during migration, and provides wizards for setting up the connection.

Exchange 2003, when combined with Outlook 2003 clients, also uses several client/server communications tricks to cut down on the amount of extraneous traffic generated, allowing companies to deploy fewer Exchange servers or to reduce the number they have deployed. Less traffic also means a better user experience when somebody is connecting via a narrowband dialup connection while on the road or at home.

For example, the Cached Exchange Mode in Outlook is useful with mobile workers, says Microsoft's Frost. This mode allows certain functions that would normally be carried out by the server to be carried out by Outlook instead, reducing traffic overhead and increasing server stability. In addition, MAPI compression compresses the mailbox on the server (up to 70%, the company claims) before it is sent to the client, to reduce bandwidth. And with Outlook Web Access, encrypted HTTP access means you do not always need to be on a VPN to access your inbox.

One of Microsoft's poster children for Exchange 2003's early adopter programme was Pacific Life Insurance, a large US-based insurance carrier (which frequently acts as a case study for Microsoft products). Pacific Life claimed it slashed 75% off email management time required, and removed the need for 86% of its Exchange servers when it moved from 5.5 to 2003. The company reduced 28 mail servers at 26 locations to four servers at the corporate headquarters, and estimates that this will save $150,000 over three years.

It is not just offering mobility to information workers that the collaboration vendors are interested in, it is also broadening the reach of email to those who would perhaps not normally use it. A report from analysts The Radicati Group in October found that the so-called "workforce email market", addressing deskless users who need the bare minimum of functionality and easy, often shared, access, was worth only about $12m this year, but that it could be worth more than $750m by 2007.

IBM's big messaging news of 2003 was its entrance to the deskless email category. With email a saturated market among deskbound information workers, companies including IBM are looking at the 'unserved' working population – employees who do not spend their day staring at a computer screen, but could still benefit from half a dozen missives a day, such as internal corporate announcements. And companies benefit from being able to talk to their employees faster, cutting down on the process and costs of physically delivering messages in person or via snail mail.

IBM says its new Lotus Workplace Messaging 1.1 offering can give the essentials of email access to the masses for about $2 per user per month. Organisations can add functionality, such as the recently introduced Lotus Workplace Team Collaboration 1.1, which features instant messaging and web conferencing, or Workplace Collaborative Learning 1.1, as and when needs increase.

It is all part of IBM's adoption of a modular, standards-based architecture, according to John Caffrey, Lotus' manager of messaging solutions. As the company's Lotus division becomes more intertwined with the rest of IBM's software group, its products are moving into a Java 2 Enterprise Edition-based model built on top of the WebSphere application server and related products. This allows more choice in what complementary third-party technologies are deployed and an easier upgrade path, Caffrey says.

"As we go from release to release, we are starting to add capabilities and upgrades," he says, "as opposed to the 'rip and replace' upgrades you have to do as you go between the same upgrades in homogeneous environments.

"Workplace Messaging 1.1 is also the first messaging software from IBM to leverage the DB2 database as its message store. The company plans to move Lotus Notes to DB2 also with version 7.0, due sometime in the second half of 2004. Microsoft's plan is similar – to use the version of SQL Server currently codenamed Yukon and due for delivery in 2006.

Oracle, meanwhile, is a new entrant to the market, and is building on top of its flagship relational database from the offset. Its Collaboration Suite is about a year old, and hit version 2.0 in mid-2003. The company is calling attention to the cost savings that can come from consolidating your messaging infrastructure in one place.

"One thing Microsoft, IBM and Oracle actually agree on is that the best place for a message store is a relational database," says Sunir Kapoor, VP of Oracle's Collaboration Suite. "The difference is we're doing it now."

Kapoor says that throwing more servers at the scalability problem does not get around the fact that you can cut down on storage by consolidating messages in one repository – with, best practices would say, suitable backup and redundancy.

Say, for example, the HR department sends an email announcing the date of the Christmas party to each of the company's 1,000 employees. That email is not stored 1,000 times, but if you're messaging infrastructure consists of five mail servers, that email is stored once on each server, five times. However, if you're using a relational database as the message store, the email is stored just once.

For a version 2.0 product, Oracle is already promising a lot of functionality with Collaboration Suite, including unified messaging – email, voicemail and fax delivered to the same inbox – shared file stores, and web conferencing. And a pervasive Ultra Search feature allows users to pull up emails, attachments and other files.

The wireless features of the software allow users to access their mail, calendars and scheduling from any wireless device, Kapoor says. Users can also create a Mobile Inbox, setting up filters that forward to their mobile devices messages that are, for example, from a certain colleague and have a certain keyword in the subject line. This can help to reduce the amount of data that needs to be downloaded when on the road.

The next big thing with Oracle, as with Microsoft, will be the addition of live communications, based on presence technology and instant messaging, to the system. Oracle is planning this for Collaboration Suite next year. Microsoft has already launched its Live Communications Server 2003, which is, like Exchange, part of the Server System suite of applications. IBM, with its Notes-integrated Sametime software, now known as Lotus Instant Messaging, arguably invented the enterprise IM market.

It is a time of rapid change, with most of the major enterprise messaging vendors hurriedly adding functionality to help make their customers' employees more productive, while consolidating features and code to help them save money.

CBR opinion
There are many technological changes that are moving the messaging market forward. There are architectural changes such as IBM's focus on a J2EE-based model or Microsoft's planned integration of Exchange with Yukon. There are also functionality changes, such as the convergence with instant messaging, presence and advanced features such as videoconferencing. It is a busy time in the industry, a time of change. When making their spending decisions buyers should be thinking about the state of the market a few years down the line before picking the solution that best fits their technological needs and budgets.

© Copyright ComputerWire 2004

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FT.com: Tools to contain the information explosion
By Philip Manchester

Good data management is central to compliance with new rules on corporate governance, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the US and forthcoming Basel II recommendations on risk management. Companies must store and make available all data relating to their business activities and also prove that the processes that created the data conform to the rules. Large global companies, for example, must be able to bring all relevant sales and accounting data together from their international subsidiaries to show their true overall position.

It is not only operational and financial data that must be recorded. Businesses are also obliged to store "unstructured" data, such as e-mail messages and their attachments, and even multimedia data, such as certain types of telephone conversations and video conferences. Storage and proper management of this continuously expanding corporate database clearly places an increased burden on information technology (IT) systems. Not only must companies store a huge amount of data, they must ensure that it is both easily accessible and "tamper-proof".

"IT is the central nervous system of an organisation," says Brian Gregory, European e-business marketing director at Oracle, the software company. "It sends the operational instructions down the line and provides the means to access information and approve processes. Systems must, therefore, be available, reliable, secure and scaleable."

As a major supplier of database management software, Oracle is acutely aware of the problems that companies face when putting their data in a suitable form to meet the new rules on corporate governance. Oracle originally built its reputation by providing software to manage corporate databases of operational data but, over the last decade, it has extended its product range to handle "new" types of data such as e-mail and multimedia.

Mr Gregory explains: "When you first start to look at the data requirements for compliance, it is natural to concentrate on consolidating operational data - accounting sales figures and so on. Obviously it is important to look at performance data - but the unstructured data is just as important."

Over the past decade businesses around the world have built up vast information stores that have become both an asset and a liability. On the one hand, the data that is kept in corporate databases must be properly stored - and easily retrieved - to comply with the new rules. On the other hand, it can also yield important information or "business intelligence" to help improve performance and cut costs. So, while they must invest in better data management to meet the new regulatory environment, organisations can also gain real business benefits from better access to and control over their data resources.

Keeping large amounts of different types of data for long periods is extremely costly. The US-based financial services supplier EPL, for example, found that the cost of keeping its transactional data on mainframe storage devices was too high: "We provide banking services for the larger US credit unions and must keep data, such as receipts and electronic signatures, in PDF format so they are unchangeable," explains Michael Stoeckert, chief information officer at EPL. "But it is too costly to store this sort of data on mainframes for any length of time."

To help it to meet compliance rules, EPL opted to transfer control of its data resources to Oracle Collaboration Suite (OCS), a product that integrates tools such as voicemail, e-mail, scheduling and file sharing into a single package underpinned by a database infrastructure. Products like OCS can help to reduce the costs of storage by moving infrequently accessed files to less expensive storage media. "We needed a 100 per cent solution that would deal with all our data management problems," says Mr Stoeckert. "OCS ensures that any communication between us and our credit union customers is captured and stored. This covers a whole range of data including e-mail and voicemail."

EPL's auditors can search the content with Oracle's Ultrasearch tool in place of complex and time-consuming manual searches. This enables data stored in a variety of formats to be located and retrieved quickly and easily. "Data management is very difficult if you don't have something like OCS," says Mr Stoeckert.

Rusty Smith, director of information life-cycle management at Hewlett-Packard's storage division, agrees that the key is consolidation of data under a single management regime. "Companies must find ways to bring their data together and store it for longer than previously. The [corporate governance] regulations effectively mean that you have to keep a data layer that will outlive the physical storage. It is even possible that the application that created the data may no longer exist, so you must have tools in place to access it. Companies need a strategy to manage data in the long term without incurring unacceptable costs."

Mr Smith adds that organisations must also fully understand the processes that create their data: "It is not only about archiving data and storage - it is also about the services and business processes that generate the data. Different types of data have different relevance depending on the context."

Andy Cleverly, technical marketing director at Oracle, says that a coherent data management architecture that can cope with multiple sources of data is an essential starting point for companies to comply with the new rules. "If you want to get it right and keep the cost down," he says, "you must have the right infrastructure. It is not about bolting on bits and pieces to solve the compliance problem. You have a lot to manage with different system platforms generating data in all sorts of formats."

A proper infrastructure, believes Mr Cleverly, enables organisations to deal with the three main issues involved in compliance - consolidation of data, automation of processes that create data and standardisation. "You have to bring the data together under a single infrastructure to make it easier and less expensive to manage. But you also have to automate the processes that create data. If you can automate the business flow, it is easier to guarantee the process. And, finally, if you can standardise as much as possible, you can eliminate many of the integration problems. If you only have one platform, it is a lot easier to integrate."

One standard in particular - the extensible mark-up language (XML) - is set to play a key role in moves to meet compliance regulations. Derived from widely accepted internet standards, XML enables organisations to define data formats in a common way. It was originally devised to allow companies to exchange electronic documents. But it also makes internal data consolidation much easier. Oracle, for example, has embraced XML in its data management products.

In effect, XML defines the "meaning" of the data - the metadata - so that data from different systems can be translated into an understandable form. "XML is playing an increasing part in data consolidation," explains Kirsten Jeffries, marketing manager at business intelligence software company Business Objects. "The really important part is being able to share the metadata between different systems. XML means no more re-keying data and no more need to redefine data from one system to another."

eShe notes that XML also helps to create a common data warehouse that can form the foundation for business intelligence applications. "XML is not just about the data itself. It brings the consistency that you need for compliance - but it also gives the potential to get a better view of the business through business intelligence."

© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2004. "FT" and "Financial Times" are trademarks of the Financial Times.

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