Oracle has introduced its enterprise collaboration and social networking tool for business, ‘Social Network’. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced the new tool in a keynote address at this year’s Oracle OpenWorld event in San Francisco.
Oracle said that Social Network enables business users to find and collaborate with the right people within their enterprise and across enterprises. The tool also allows business users to collaborate with each other using a broad range of collaboration tools, including personal profiles, groups, activity feeds, status updates, discussion forums, document sharing, co-browsing and editing, instant messaging, email, and Web conferencing.
Social Network is integrated with Oracle Fusion Applications, business intelligence, and business processes allowing users to receive real-time information feeds from these systems and to collaborate and resolve business issues quickly and effectively.
Oracle Social Network is designed to allow mobile users to always stay connected and to participate in business conversations. The company said that it does so by providing native applications on a variety of devices, including iPhones, iPads, and Android devices, as well as a browser interface.
The company said that the tool meets corporate demands for security, privacy, and information protection by providing each enterprise and its users with a virtualised and private instance for collaboration with configurable retention and audit policies for traceability, Oracle said.
The company claims Social Network helps marketing teams to design more creative marketing campaigns, target the right customers and partners, and collaborate with sales teams to generate the highest quality leads. It also helps human resources professionals and managers to collaborate on workforce planning and staffing, said Oracle.
Oracle Social Network provides personalised and configurable alerts that enable users to stay informed of actions.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said the biggest change over the past few years is social networking.
Ellison continued: "Today, organisations want to connect their people, their applications, their processes and their customers. Oracle Social Network provides that; all the tools are integrated and employees can work from anywhere in the world with the devices best suited to their job."