Oracle Announces Collaboration Suite

Have you noticed that not all email (corporate email, that is) is coming to your courtesy of Lotus Notes/Domino or Microsoft Exchange?  Even though the two email giants have sold far more than 100 million email seats between them, we’re starting to see an interest in other kinds of solutions.

Some of this is part of the continuing interest in web-based software and some of the new products were indeed designed for the web, often for ISP’s and other Service Providers, rather than for individual corporations.

In any case, email is an aging application and lots of vendors are counting up the number of users and potential users (immense) and saying “Why not me.”  Oracle, it seems, is one of those.

Oracle has tried to move into the office software arena several times in the past, but not successfully.  We suspect this isn’t because they couldn’t write good software – office software isn’t harder than sophisticated databases – but rather that Oracle kept telling office users what they needed rather than asking them what they wanted.

They’re at it again, informing IT departments that there’s no need for Microsoft Exchange. The new Oracle Collaboration Suite lets companies store and search for e-mails, voice mail, appointments, documents and PowerPoint presentations on a single database, Oracle’s 9i.  Some of the function in the suite comes from Oracle’s acquisition of Steltor, a Canadian time management software company. 

Oracle’s Collaboration Suite is used in conjunction with Microsoft’s Outlook mail client and Internet Explorer Browser, which almost ever user is likely to have already.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison says that this will be a better, much better and cheaper, much cheaper idea.  He also believes it will compete with Lotus Notes although he apparently thinks that the real competition is mainly Microsoft.

We suspect that Microsoft and Lotus will have lots more competition than Oracle to worry about.  We plan to be writing about some of the web-based email products soon.  

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