In order to achieve even the most basic of business goals, everyone in an organization collaborates in some way.  Enterprise Collaboration requires people to coordinate and communicate around an activity at hand and requires different tools depending on the phase of the activity.

An example can be a team of knowledge workers (Engineers, Architects, etc) working on a proposal. At certain points in time, they need to be able to communicate the proposal amongst each other or to coordinate their milestones for this project. Throughout the whole process, experts on various aspects of the projects need to communicate their ideas and provide feedback. Teams need tools that allow them to effectively work together, to see and use the contributions of other team members, and to track the tasks associated with achieving the team’s goals.

Why a Beehive? In an American Scientist Online  article about honeybees, we learn that honeybee scouts search for possible locations of a new hive and then communicate that information to other swarm members. Other bees consume this information, examine and evaluate a potential location, return to the swarm, and communicate their "thoughts" on how good the site is. Finally, when enough scouts promote the same site, a quorum is reached and the new hive location is selected. Consider the following principles observed by honeybees in their decision-making:
1.    A diversity of independent information sources is critical to making the best decisions;
2.    Aggregation of information followed by independent evaluation of the information leads to a core set of choices;
3.    Collection and distribution of independent decisions enables a unifying decision to be reached as rapidly as possible.

Beehive is Oracle’s newest software platform for enterprise collaboration. Beehive provides collaborative tools built around a unified collaborative model allowing team members to work together and accomplish their goals. Using Oracle Beehive, enterprises can centrally provision, manage, securely audit, and globally apply compliance rules to all users and teams at the workgroup, departmental or enterprise level. Oracle Beehive offers the lowest total cost of ownership, and delivers significant customer value either installed alongside existing messaging infrastructure or in place of it. These tools help teams to collaborate efficiently across multiple geographies and organizations with: 

•    Group scheduling and calendaring with resource management and direct access to team members’ corporate calendars. 
•    Team task management with assignments and reporting. 
•    Team member communication via e-mail, voicemail and instant messaging. 
•    Discussions capabilities that allow long running conversations on any document or subject. 
•    Voice and Web Conferencing from various clients 
•    Basic collaborative data management capabilities with check-in/check-out, versioning and locking functionality. 
•    Workflow and notification capabilities that allow users to determine when and how they want to be notified of activities. 
•    Team and organizational directories that expose presence and make it easy to contact team members.