: pros and cons
: status symbols
the buzz about oracle beehive
By Brian Jackson
n sAN FrANCIsCO-BAsEd OrACLE COrP.
has returned to the enterprise collaboration
space, releasing Beehive at its annual conference.
Three years ago Oracle was supporting
Oracle Collaboration Server 10, but failed to win
over many customers with the software. The
enterprise software company quickly shrunk
away from the product; it remained on the price
list, but no one would talk about it.
“OCS was a failure,” says Jeffrey Mann, an
analyst with Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc.
“It became radioactive within their organization.”
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.
products such as Microsoft Outlook and Lotus
Notes. It works with Microsoft, Linux and Solaris
operating systems.
The software’s flexibility should help users
ease into using Beehive, says Charles Phillips,
president of Oracle.
“You don’t have to jump to Beehive all at
once,” he says. “You can do it in little steps.”
analyst Mann says. Microsoft and IBM likely have
this cornered already and there’s nothing very
new about Beehive that will turn heads. “It’s not
so new and so different that people will want to
dump something and move to it,” he says. “Even
the mash-up capability has been seen before.”
Oracle is even suffering from some product
overlap in its own lineup of software. WebCenter
already has a wiki functionality, for example, and
Beehive will gain this in a future update. Plus,
some products Oracle acquired from BEA cover
the collaboration space.
“They’ve got two different products that
should be the same thing,” Mann says.
By Martyn Williams
Tokyo Bureau Chief, IDG News Service
martyn_williams@idg.com
flexible 3-m
plasma in 2009
PROS
ADAPTABLE
Beehive users can choose to either use a Microsoft Exchange server or Oracle’s own server
to operate the collaboration environment.
The product plugs in to daily-use enterprise
SECURE
The user that creates a workspace has full
control over the rights of the other users who
are collaborating on a project. There’s also built-in document management to ensure control of
information placed in the workspace.
For example, if a document is deleted in the
workspace, it is deleted everywhere else that
it might have been copied, says Greg Crider,
senior director of product marketing at Oracle.
“Customers come to us because they have specific compliance needs,” Crider says. “Our initial
focus is to help our customers that are feeling
the pain of trying to bring together collaboration
across many different service environments.”
Users have the ability to audit all of the actions performed in a shared workspace.
CONS
NOT THAT DIFFERENT
The enterprise collaboration market is already
fairly established and Oracle is late to the game,
LACKS OU T-OF-BOX EXPERIENCE
Beehive comes ready with a minimal database
to make it work, but is best used by companies
with an existing Oracle infrastructure. That will
limit likely adopters of the software to existing
Oracle customers, not new clients, Mann says.
Also, the focus on plugging in to existing software could be a weakness for some companies.
“Because of the focus on the back-end, there
is no single client,” the Gartner analyst says.
“The downside of that is if you’re not ready for
that, you have to mash it up, there’s no out-of-the-box experience.”
While Beehive works very well with Outlook,
the functionality is harder to integrate with
Lotus Notes.
: editor’s picks
By Dave Webb
editor, Computer World Canada
dwebb@itworldcanada.com
Your
first
reaction
is likely:
What the
heck is that? “that” is
sanyo’s PLc-XL51 Lcd projector, which the company calls the
world’s shortest projection distance projector. from a distance
of about three inches, the PLc-X51 can project an image of up
to 80 inches. sanyo is aiming the unit (pun entirely intended)
at classroom, conference room and advertising applications.
there’s 2,700 lumens of power, a 600:1 contrast ratio and
built-in networking. the list price will be $3,700.
by press time, 01
communique will have
launched the securePc, a thin
client laptop designed to fight
data loss and leakage. Workers
access their office desktop
with the company’s i’m intouch
software, and no files are stored
on the laptop. users can also
enable physical authentication
on the laptop.
n A JAPANEsE dIsPLAY s TAr T-UP Is
well on the way to commercializing a
three-metre wide flexible plasma display,
and expects the first models to appear
next year.
The 125-inch display is made using
a proprietary plasma array technology
developed by the company, Shinoda
Plasma, with the first screens aimed at
public display applications. A prototype
on show at the FPD International exhibition in Japan attracted crowds of mostly
display industry insider attendees.
“Basically, this display is based on
the plasma display technology, but it’s a
very unique technology,” said Manabu
Ishimoto, chief financial officer of the
company.
Rather than make the screen on large
sheets of inflexible glass, the plasma
array screen uses thin glass tubes with
walls that are just 0.1 millimeters thick.
Inside the tubes, the construction is
similar to that of conventional plasma
display panels, but the use of the tubes
means the screen is not only thin — the
three-metre-by-one-metre prototype is
only a millimeter thick — but also
flexible.
As an indication of how
closely the company is guarding the
technology, it hired guards at the
display exhibition to stop visitors
from getting too close to the screen,
and make sure that no-one but journalists took photos of it.
In addition to its size and flexibility,
the panel is light, weighing about 1.4
kilograms. It also uses a maximum of
600 watts of power, which is less than
half that of a display array made with
conventional plasma display panels,
said Ishimoto.
Samples of the screen are already with
manufacturing companies and commercial versions are expected in April or
May next year.
But don’t go hoping for it on your liv-ing-room wall just yet. The prototype has
a relatively low resolution of 960 pixels
by 360 pixels, which is fine for public
information displays but is well below that
of even standard-definition television.
Shinoda Plasma was spun off from
Fujitsu when it decided to halt development of plasma display panels. Fujitsu
doesn’t own a stake in the company, but
the two are close, with Fujitsu serving as
a distribution channel.
fortinet’s fortigate-620b appliance integrates eight core security
functions, including anti-virus, intrusion prevention, spyware prevention,
anti-spam, Web content filtering, traffic shaping, VPn and firewall. it’s
expandable to 24 ports and has firewall throughput of 16gbps and VPn
throughput of 12 gbps.
