![]() Most of Steltor's development team and support staff members have joined Oracle. In June, the company acquired Steltor, whose CorporateTime calendar server has, for several years, been an alternative to Exchange for companies looking for a group-scheduling solution compatible with Outlook. ![]() OCS runs on top of Oracle9i Database and Oracle9i Application Server. Oracle is poised to expand its database-driven email server later this year into a more complete Outlook-friendly mail and calendar platform called Oracle Collaboration Suite. He noted, however, that Oracle and others are challenging Microsoft's claim. Levitt said that although other mail servers also support the Outlook client through IMAP4, many people believe Microsoft's claim that Exchange's native integration with Outlook provides better performance and functionality than do platforms that depend on IMAP for mail connections. The tight integration between Outlook and Exchange gets partial credit for Exchange's success. "But in no way has the marketplace moved beyond email, which remains central to most collaboration because users are most comfortable using email for communication." "Collaboration has expanded over the past several years to increasingly involve conferencing (online meetings, application sharing), business Instant Messaging, and team collaborative applications (virtual workspaces)," he responded. I asked IDC analyst Mark Levitt, one of the report's coauthors, how the definition of collaboration has grown beyond just email. The IDC report projects that the number of ICE users worldwide will increase in 2002 from 210 million to 240 million. IBM still is number one in total ICE revenue, however. ![]() According to IDC's "Worldwide Integrated Collaborative Environments Forecast and Analysis, 2002-2006: How Vendors Can Keep the ICE Flowing" report, those numbers put Exchange on top in both total users and new users, beating out nearest rivals IBM (Lotus Notes and Domino) and Novell (GroupWise). Microsoft is cheering about a new analysis that shows that Exchange Server's user base grew by 30 percent in 2001, increasing its worldwide share of integrated collaborative environments (ICEs) to 39 percent.
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