I’m attending Oracle OpenWorld this week (thanks to 1. living down the street from Moscone Center in San Francisco, 2. Oracle providing me a Press/Blogger credential. Thanks!)

One of the biggest announcements this week is Oracle Beehive, a new system built from scratch that attempts to tie together multiple communication and collaboration tools within an organization and give teams a central, shared workspace. According to CNET’s Dawn Kawamoto:

Beehive seeks to take communication software, from e-mail to instant messaging to chat, and the various security rules, databases and storage that are tied to each product on separate servers, and integrate them with few servers on one platform.

Collaboration features are also built into the Beehive software, which allow users to…share documents, video, and other materials through Beehive’s team workspace feature.

Peter O’Kelly offers his initial impressions of Beehive, and comments on its treatment of wikis as a pervasive way of collaboration, and more than just a distinct tool:

Beehive’s wiki-centric model — pervasively supporting “the wiki way”, rather than treating wikis as a distinct workspace capability, is another useful example of beyond-the-basics hypertext support.

Here’s the kicker – Oracle announced that Beehive will replace its Collaboration Suite tool, which is equivalent to Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange. Does this signal a shift in the collaboration paradigm – away from the “push” structure of email and toward the “pull” structure of wikis. Dana Gardner thinks so:

The cost, security risks, and lack of extension of the data inside of Exchange, and on all those end device hard drives, is a non-sustainable IT milestone.

Enterprises over the next several years will be undertaking a rethinking of messaging, from a paradigm, cost and feature set perspective. A big, honking expensive client-server approach will give way to something cheaper, more flexible, able to integrate better, more likey to play well in an on-premises cloud, where the data files are not messaging-system specific. Exchange is a Model T in a Thunderbird world.