OCS is becoming the dominant product for large-scale collaboration--blending core functions of e-mail, file serving, and diary management with the additional functionality of web conferencing, instant messaging, and wireless access. Pro Oracle Collaboration Suite 10g provides all you need to know to install and configure OCS for use, but this book is much more than a to-do list.

It covers the architecture of the server processes and the applications, giving you the theoretical background to take OCS beyond the basics. There's no need to worry if you're new to the Oracle database, Oracle Components for Java environment (OC4J), HTTP web servers, or LDAP Internet directories--everything is explained carefully. But if you are already familiar with these topics, you'll learn how to fully exploit them in order to optimize your OCS installation.

You don’t have to be an Oracle database administrator or an Oracle Application Server
administrator to manage an Oracle Collaboration Suite environment. You don’t have to be
a network administrator or a system administrator either. You don’t have to be an expert at
managing collaboration services, such as e-mail systems and file servers. But any and all of
these skills will help you to manage Oracle Collaboration Suite. The approach I’ve taken in this
book is to provide enough information on all these topics to understand their importance and
relevance for the use and administration of Oracle Collaboration Suite and to perform some
critical tasks; but I have not attempted to teach you all the skills. There are shops with whole
bookcases full of material on these matters (one of them written, and several edited, by me).
As you become more deeply involved with managing and using Oracle Collaboration Suite,
you will have to do further studying in all of the related subjects.

So what is this book? It is an introduction to an immensely powerful set of applications,
which run on the most powerful server technology in the world. I say introduction because
the applications and the technologies are huge and complex; they each need many books to
cover them comprehensively.