Oracle Applications DBA Blog

Oracle Collaboration Suite

Its been quite sometime since my last post, but i have been traveling again. This time to the hot terrains of the Middle East. Traveling I found is one of the things that comes along with your job as an applications DBA consultant, you got to take it  weather you like it or not. Though some of my colleagues have taken up support assignments which means a steady place for a  long time somehow  I feel that is what I plan to do near retirement (no offences intended).
Experience tells me every visit holds its share of surprises and this one was no different.
I came across this really nice implementation of Oracle Collaboration Suite with seamless integration with Oracle  Applications. Something that would be a part of Release 12 or Fusion Applications.

In my today's post i will cover an overview of the Oracle Collaboration Suite. Oracle Collaboration Suite (OCS) integrates a set of applications that enable seamless collaboration within an enterprise in a efficient and secure manner. By introducing  the collaboration suite Oracle aims at reducing the dependency of the enterprise on multiple third-party products for the  achieving the same.

Additionally Collaboration suite also ensure compliance requirements by implementation polices and procedures across the  enterprise. It secures the system by implementing features like intrusion detection, data protection and access control.

Collaboration suite also implements Single Sign On in an out of box implementation thereby reducing the requirement of any additional configuration or setups. It has an inbuilt LDAP server for this purpose which is the Oracle Internet Directory. Its also makes use a simplified provisioning policy from a unified console which can be used to add, delete and 
modify existing users.

The Collaboration suite also makes use of the Oracle Delegated Administration Services (DAS) which enable directory administrators to delegate responsibilities to lower administrators or to end users.

Oracle Collaboration suite is also highly scalable and optionally leverages the benefits of Oracle Real Application Clusters to achieve a high availability architecture.

Another interesting component that is bundled with the collaboration suite is the Oracle Web Cache. Apart from improving performance by using caching techniques the web cache also allows for load balancing.

DMZ configurations can also be implemented with in a Oracle Collaboration suite architecture.

With such extensive features management of the system from an administrator’s point of view might end up as a complex  task, but that’s where the Oracle Enterprise Manager(OEM) comes into picture. The OEM acts as a centralized tool for  monitoring real-time use and performance monitoring, configuration, and control operations such as starting and stopping  processes.

The most current version of the collaboration suite is OCS 10g Release 1 (10.1.2)

The main components of Oracle Collaboration Suite can be classified as under

• Calendar
• Content Services
• Discussions
• Mail
• Mobile Collaboration
• Real-Time Collaboration
• Search
• Voicemail and Fax
• Workspaces

The figure below depicts the architecture of Oracle Collaboration suite.

Oracle Calendar Services
Oracle Calendar is the time management and resource scheduling component of Oracle Collaboration Suite. It comprises of a  central calendar server and a calendar client. this client can either be a desktop client or a web based client. OCS also provides a Connecter for Microsoft Outlook to enable you use your existing outlook client with oracle calendar.

Oracle Content Services
Oracle content services provide a set of application services for file and document management across the enterprise. For  this content services makes use of various oracle tools like oracle drive for file management, Oracle BPEL for powerful custom workflows. Oracle Content services support the HTTP,FTP,FTPS and WebDAV protocols.

Discussions
Oracle discussions provide for message posting and idea exchanging within the enterprise. It includes features like RSS  feeds, Web Services and integration with email and portal.

Mail
Oracle Mail is a complete email system that is built around the oracle 10g database. It has a desktop client as well as web  based client. Additionally you can use the oracle connecter for outlook to use your outlook mail client with oracle mail.

Mobile Collaboration
Oracle Collaboration suite also provides mobile /wireless access to OCS services like mail calendar and content services. This  can be via SMS or through mobile browsers using a supported markup language.

Real Time Collaboration
Real Time collaboration is provided across the business by using two main components which are Oracle Web Conferencing.Oracle web conferencing is a thin client web conferencing tool which runs on client  using just a plug-in inside a web browser.
The other tool is the Oracle Messenger which supports instant messaging across the enterprise using both normal and secure  protocols.

Search
Oracle Collaboration Suite 10g Search is Oracle Collaboration Suite's cross-application search tool. This is built upon  Oracle Ultra Search and is used to search across OCS services like content services mail and calendar.

Voicemail and Fax
Oracle Collaboration suite 10g provides a voicemail and fax which allows retrieval storage of voicemail and fax messages. It  also provides a web based client for ease of administration and uses industry recognized formats like .wav and .tif.

Workspaces
The workspace component of Oracle Collaboration Suite 10g provides a comprehensive set of tools to manage  documents, meetings, tasks and discussions. It uses web services to implement these features.