Oracle helps drain the swamp

If you're part of an organization that happens to be a big customer of Oracle's, your calendar swamp-draining ship has come in. Oracle Beehive, a suite of group collaboration tools, includes a calendar server that fully supports CalDAV, which means it seamlessly works as a server for a growing variety of clients, including my fave, Sunbird. Of course there's also support for the ubiquitous Microsoft Outlook. If you're at Oracle OpenWorld this week in San Francisco, check out the Beehive demo for other cool features, such as integration with instant messaging that notifies those trying to reach you that you're in a meeting because it says so on your calendar. (They can still IM you anyway, of course.) At any rate, although it's a pricey solution, Oracle earns +2 SwampDrain points for potentially bringing much of big business and big government into a right proper calendar-sharing frame of mind, and for doing it without creating or requiring its own calendar client software, which keeps things simpler.