Thoughts on Oracle Collaboration Suite 10g, Aug 31

Oracle released Oracle Collaboration Suite 10g earlier this week, the latest edition of its suite of collaboration products for the enterprise market. The Suite includes four main components that work on the Oracle Database 10g and Application Server 10g:

• Content Services ... offering document and file management, records management functions, and document sharing capabilities. Formerly called Oracle Files, Content Services is aimed at bringing "good enough" content management capabilities to the enterprise user.


• Workspaces ... a collaborative workspace product for internal project teams. Enables information workers to access discussions, meetings, action points, tasks and emails related to a specific project. This review further explores the Workspaces capability.


• Real-Time Collaboration ... instant messaging, voice chat, presence and Web conferencing capabilities to enable real-time interaction between people.


• Unified Messaging ... email, voicemail and fax capture, storage and access within a unified interface for information workers. Access from a Web browser is supported, and the Push-IMAP standard is used to push new emails to users on wireless devices.

The Suite is priced at $60 per user, or $45 per user per component. Records Management is treated as a value-added option to Content Services, and costs an additional $100 per user.

Oracle Collaboration Suite 10g is currently available for Linux x86 and Solaris. A Windows version has not been released at this time.

Workspaces 10g

The addition of Workspaces 10g is a good move by Oracle, and is being touted as a "SharePoint killer". How well it does that remains to be seen, but by using that term Oracle instantly provides a clear classification of the product in the mind of potential users. Digging into the capabilities of Workspaces 10g reveals the following:

• Users with appropriate rights can create a Workspace for a team project. Templates are provided to bring together a set of collaborative services for a specific type of project.


• Within a Workspace, users can share documents, hold discussions and meetings, and manage a shared list of tasks.


• The main interface for users is a Web browser (meaning that offline access via synchronization with a rich client is not available). Users can access some Workspaces 10g content through different clients, such as email and discussions from IMAP-capable clients (eg, Outlook), calendars and schedules from calendar clients, and documents via WebDAV file browsers.


• A software development kit enables ISVs and corporate developers to integrate the capabilities of Workspaces 10g into other applications.


• A "What's New" listing of new and revised items since the user last accessed the workspace.


• Members and non-members can email relevant material into the workspace.

Analysis
Some thoughts about OCS 10g in the market:

• Microsoft makes a big play on "agility". Given that Oracle's collaboration stack has fewer moving parts (ie, fewer required server software products), and is already built on a relational database, one could say that Oracle offers better and earlier agility benefits to IT organizations.


• The offering is priced to sell. At an end-user level, the economics for adoption are very attractive. $60/user brings enterprise email, calendaring, team workspaces, Web conferencing, instant messaging and presence, and more. Even in comparison to Scalix--the Linux-based email server vendor--Oracle has a very compelling entry price.


• This product won't be a threat in Notes/Domino shops that have an installed base of custom-build and workflow-enabled Notes/Domino applications. Unless the Notes/Domino shop is willing to shift to "just a vanilla team workspace" approach, there's nothing in here to replace the application development capabilities in Notes/Domino.

Unknown Points
Oracle is briefing me later in the week on 10g. Here are some questions that I'll take into the session:

• What are the requirements for including external users in a Workspace?


• Is Pillar 2 for offline access is addressed at all? It appears that users will not be able to take Workspace content offline, make changes while on an airplane, and then reconnect to the network and synchronize those changes.


• Is Pillar 4, for automatic calendar consolidation and Suite-wide free/busy search addressed? Oracle has the technical foundation to enable this, with (a) the calendar server assets it acquired with the Steltor acquisition of some years back, and (b) the storage of data elements in the Oracle database. But have they done it?


• Is Pillar 6, for automatic consolidation of assigned tasks across all workspaces addressed? Again, with Oracle apparently storing task data in the Oracle Database, can users access a single consolidated listing of everything they are expected to do? Does that list synchronize with Palm and Pocket PC devices so users can carry that around and mark off items when out-and-about? The available client installs for Pocket PC and Palm appear limited to synchronization of calendar entries.


• Are there any Pillar 7 capabilities in the Suite, to automatically notify users of other people they could talk with? Tacit knowledge and understanding will be built up in the system over time, and automatic search and notification queries could be used to notify users when there are other people that they could consult with on a specific problem or issue.

Next Action
If you are interested in an personalized exploration of the use of Oracle Collaboration Suite 10g within your environment, please get in contact with me.

Comments

[Jason Welch]

Many analysts make the mistake of thinking of SharePoint as a collaboration platform only. What is often left out is that SharePoint is designed as a starting point for the development of enterprise and external facing solutions. The SharePoint platform is extremely programmable via binary APIs or web services. Oracle is smart to compete on the collaboration side, but I think they have a ways to go to match the collection of APIs and internal services Microsoft has developed to make SharePoint a leading enterprise portal solution.

[James Till]

Re: Pillar #2 - I believe you will find that Oracle Drive, the client application Oracle has licensed from Xythos will help address the offline access and synchronization issues with Oracle Collaboration Suite. The Oracle Drive also "WebDAV-enables" desktop applications which can't use Micrososft web folders.

[Richi Jennings]

The thing is, conventional, general-purpose RDBMs such as Oracle are simply a bad way to implement an email store. I think this is mainly how OCS gets its poor scalability and reliability reputation.

Even IBM seems to be having trouble with the NSF to DB2 migration -- I note that it's been relegated to Limited Availability/Feature Trial status in the released R7.

And we'd best draw a discreet veil over oft-stated intentions to migrate Exchange from Jetblue to SQL Server.

You mentioned Scalix. This is of course based on the HP OpenMail store design -- a database specifically designed for the task (Yes, I had a hand in OM, back in the days). It's been proven to be a much better way to go. Pride speaking ;-)

[Michael Sampson]

Jason ... thanks for sharing. When you refer to "SharePoint", are you explicitly thinking WSS/SPS, or the SPS piece only?

James ... yes, Xythos adds some offline capabilities. I'll be writing about this shortly.

Richi ... what data points do you have on "Oracle's poor scalability and reliability reputation"? By email is fine. NSF to DB2 migration for Domino ... yes, it's Limited Availability in the initial release of Domino 7, but I don't think you should write it off just yet. There were reasons given for that decision, and they sounded reasonable to me. Exchange and SQL ... it's coming ... sometime. Scalix ... based on OpenMail ... ah, yes, great product lineage. You and the team did a good job on that product.

[Richi Jennings]

Data points? I was of course careful to say "reputation."

The thing is, it's usually very hard for customers to state this sort of position publicly. Either because of personal career investment in a choice, or restrictive covenants in the software license agreements.

Let's recall that Larry keynoted Comdex Fall in 2001, quoting tens of thousands of users per server. I'm not aware of any implementations that achieve this with true, business-class workloads. OpenMail, of course, was perfectly capable of this sort of scalability.

All discussion of database design apart, the underlying issue is always one of disk I/O bandwidth. All too many store designs are too profligate in their use of the available bandwidth.

Some darn fine OpenMail engineers expended gallons of blood, sweat, and tears to minimize the number of times the disk heads had to move. (Hello Roy, Kevin, Gren, Maurice... several others.) Benefits that Scalix takes advantage of today. Especially on big iron like IBM Z-series mainframes ;-)