Sun unveils business collaboration platform

IDG News Service - Sun Microsystems Inc. unveiled a new real-time business collaboration platform today that integrates e-mail, instant messaging (IM), calendar, search and content management capabilities. The move is likely to turn up the heat in the growing collaboration market.
The Sun ONE Collaborative Business Platform will compete head to head with collaboration offerings from IBM and Microsoft Corp., analysts said.
However, Patrick Dorsey, group manager for Sun ONE Communication Products, believes the company has a leg up because of the product's scalability and Sun's strong customer base.
The new platform includes the company's Sun ONE Messaging Server, Sun ONE Calendar Server, Sun ONE Instant Messaging, Sun ONE Portal Server and Sun ONE Identity Server products. Because of the inclusion of the portal and identity management offerings, the Collaborative Business Platform offers access to the disparate content and services through a secure portal, with single sign-on and policy control.
In addition, the platform scales to millions of users, Dorsey said. "The top-line benefit is that the Sun ONE platform allows enterprises to expand and extend collaboration services out to a wide community of users," he said.
Companies can extend the services not just in-house but also to remote workers, customers and business partners, Sun said.
Dana Gardner, a senior analyst at The Yankee Group in Boston, said Sun is differentiating itself with its portal approach to the collaboration platform, despite the fact that it doesn't have the installed base that Microsoft's Exchange or IBM's Domino products have. The Sun platform also allows companies to put all their collaboration capabilities on a single server or small number of servers, he said.
Still, "all three of these vendors are headed in the same direction -- to allow collaboration components to work within business applications with one framework," Gardner said.
The new Sun platform also highlights IM and presence capabilities, which are the ability to tell when a user is online and available -- key features of IBM Lotus Sametime and Microsoft's Greenwich enterprise messaging products.
Sun ONE Collaborative Business Platform features enhanced messaging capabilities from the company's new Sun ONE Instant Messaging 6.0 software, which is also due to be rolled out today. The IM technology offers encrypted sessions and allows companies to integrate third-party virus and spam-protection software.
Building on the IM capabilities, the platform offers real-time alerts, polling, news, conferences and file transfers. The calendar and scheduling services allow users to be notified of a specific event via pop-up alerts.
Mobile access is available either through Sun's Mobile Access Pack with the SunONE Portal Server, Dorsey said, or through products provided by Sun partner NTT Data Corp.
To aid deployment, Sun is offering consulting services from itself or its partners. The consulting services are being offered as fixed-price packages.
The Sun ONE Collaborative Business Platform will be available worldwide today, Dorsey said. Price varies according to the size and extent of the deployment.