5 Oracle Beehive Workspace Concepts

Overview of Oracle Beehive Workspaces

A workspace is a virtual location that enables Oracle Beehive users to seamlessly perform a wide range of collaborative activities in a single, intuitive place. In workspaces, users can create, view, and manage e-mail messages, calendar entries, meetings, tasks, address books and contacts, instant messages, and documents.

Each workspace is created for a particular purpose or objective, such as for a project, a team, or an activity, or some combination. Based on this, workspaces are always in context for the members who belong to them, presenting only the features and content that are relevant.

From the user perspective, workspaces are listed in an enterprise-level workspace directory. Users access the workspaces to which they belong, as well as other public workspaces that appear in the workspace directory, through supported Oracle Beehive clients and devices.

Accessing Oracle Beehive Workspaces

Users and systems can access workspace content and functions through one or more of the following:

• Supported Oracle Beehive clients, such as Oracle Beehive Integration for Outlook, Oracle Beehive Extensions for Explorer, Oracle Beehive Team Collaboration, Oracle Beehive Webmail, and standards-based clients.

• Oracle Beehive Platform Software Developer's Kit (SDK)

Types of Workspaces Provided by Oracle Beehive

Oracle Beehive provides the following types of workspaces:

• Team Workspaces

• Personal Workspaces

Oracle Beehive Workspace Properties and Settings

Oracle Beehive workspaces contain properties that workspace coordinators can specify. Common workspace properties include the following:

• Workspace name: The name of the workspace.

• Description: A brief description or summary of the workspace.

• Owner: The person who created the workspace and who is typically the primary point of contact for requests or issues related to the workspace.

• Location: The Oracle Beehive deployment to which the workspace belongs.

• Workspace URL: The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) for the workspace.

• Logo: An image file that appears in the workspace header.

• E-mail address: A designated e-mail address for the workspace. Oracle Beehive automatically forwards to workspace participants all e-mail messages sent to this address.

• Public access: Whether or not the workspace is open to users who are not workspace participants.

Workspace coordinators can also configure the following workspace settings:

• The default forum for discussion posts.

• The default location for document uploads.

• The default destination for new wiki pages.

• The default role assigned to new workspace participants.

• Whether or not participants are automatically enrolled in the workspace calendar.

• Whether or not versioning is enabled for workspace documents.

Templates for Oracle Beehive Workspaces

Oracle Beehive provides templates that enable system administrators and workspace coordinators to quickly apply specific features, processes, and designs to their workspaces. Workspace templates provide a convenient way to apply properties that are specific to a company, group, project, or function.

Oracle Beehive provides the following workspace templates out of the box:

• Basic Team Workspace template: The Basic Team Workspace template is designed for general use in team-based workspaces. This template provides the broadest coverage of collaborative features and options, and it is not specific to any particular type of group or function.

  The Basic Team Workspace template contains a wiki home page that members can edit to add information about the workspace and some tasks to guide the coordinators as they configure the workspace. It also contains a default calendar, a discussion forum, and folder for sharing documents.

  By default, workspaces based on the Basic Team Workspace template are listed in the system's public workspace directory, although users must receive invitations to join them.

• Community of Practice workspace template: The Community of Practice Workspace template is designed for workspaces where users who share common interests can post topics or discussions of interest and share best practices. The template contains an FAQ template and a wiki home page that members can edit to add information about their community of practice. It also provides default tasks (to guide the coordinators as they configure the workspace), a wiki page, and a discussion forum and folder to share best practices with other community members.

  By default, workspaces based on the Community of Practice Workspace template are listed in the system's public workspace directory. Any enterprise user can join them, with or without an invitation.

• Project Workspace template: The Project Workspace template is designed for time-constrained or date-defined projects. This template provides the Oracle Beehive features and options that facilitate collaborative, team-based projects, such as repeating status meetings and a best practices folder hierarchy for optimized management of project content.

  The Project Workspace template contains a set of tasks that can be used to initiate the project and a few wiki pages that can be used to create a business case, project plan, project completion analysis, and meeting agenda. It also contains a default calendar, a discussion forum, and a folder for sharing documents.

  By default, workspaces that are based on the Project Workspace template are not listed in the system's public workspace directory and members may join them by invitation only.

• Personal Workspace template: The Personal Workspace template is designed for personal workspaces, which are used solely by individual users to view and manage all of their content and collaborative activities in one primary location, including those that fall outside the scope of their team workspaces.

  By default, workspaces that are based on the Personal Workspace template are not listed in the system's public workspace directory. Also, although a user may not join another user's personal workspace, users can grant access to each other's personal workspaces.

Roles Provided by Oracle Beehive Workspaces

To help control access to workspaces and to coordinate the management of team workspace activities and tasks, Oracle Beehive provides workspace roles. Roles are predefined permission sets that determine what features and content users can or cannot access within a given team workspace. Users may be assigned more than one role for each team workspace.

Oracle Beehive provides standard roles as well as support for custom roles. Standard roles are provided out of the box and offer common delineations of user privileges that can be leveraged by most organizations. Custom roles are defined by administrators and can be based on existing organizational roles or on any other criteria that fits the particular hierarchical structure or division of responsibilities within an enterprise.

Oracle Beehive provides the following standard workspace roles out of the box:

• Workspace Coordinator: A user with full administrator-level privileges for the workspace and who is responsible for its creation and on-going maintenance.

• Workspace Member: A user with full access to workspace content and who can create, read, update, and delete that content.

• Workspace Viewer: A user who can only access and read workspace content.

• Workspace Participant Coordinator: A user with limited administrator-level privileges for the workspace. Workspace Participant Coordinators can invite new members, approve new membership requests, and apply roles to new and existing members.

• Workspace Document Coordinator: A user with limited administrator-level privileges for the workspace. Workspace Document Coordinators can manage workspace content, such as by locking or unlocking folders and files.

• Workspace Reviewer: A user who has read-only privileges for workspace content with ability to comment, post, and reply to discussion topics.

Tasks Workspace Coordinators Can Perform in Oracle Beehive Workspaces

Workspace coordinators can perform a variety of workspace-related tasks, including:

• Create and delete workspaces.

• Apply predefined templates, policies, processes to workspaces.

• Manage workspace groups and members such as adding users to or deleting users from workspaces, or by assigning roles.

• Manage access to workspaces by locking workspaces or by applying grant or deny settings at the workspace, user, and artifact levels.

• Configure mount points to remote content repositories created and managed by system administrators.

• Manage workspace quotas.

Tasks End Users Can Perform in Oracle Beehive Workspaces

In workspaces, users can perform the full range of collaborative tasks including creating and managing e-mail messages, calendar appointments, meetings, tasks, contacts, instant messages, discussions, and documents.

Users can also perform the following workspace-related tasks:

• Join or leave workspaces.

• Create and manage wiki pages in team workspaces.

• Search for content and other artifacts.

• Create personal tags, which enable users to organize personal workspaces and artifacts using custom, commonly-used tags that are based on individual needs and preferences.

Application developers can also leverage the Oracle Beehive Platform SDK to create solutions that enable users to perform these and other collaborative tasks through supported and custom end-user clients. For more information, see Oracle Beehive Application Developer's Guide.