Five reasons why Blackberry is still winning in the enterprise

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Interesting article I spotted on TechRepublic http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=4158&tag=nl.e101

We've not perticularly leapt on to the smartphone bandwagon as a company (although its probably something we should look into more) but I'm very interested to hear others take on this. Does your organisation make heavy use of smartphone technology? What phones do you use? Do you support users connecting their 'consumer' smartphones to your systems? Am I horrendously outdated still carrying around my N95?

 

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In the last company I worked for, mobile device support became a lot easier once they shifted from SPVs to Blackberrys with BES up and running! Even the users could set the phones up themselves as opposed to the hassle of installing mSuite or Mail for Exchange and then followed by all the sync issues!

BES wasn't exactly a wonderful thing, but in comparison to what was used before, it was a lot better!

 

We use a few BB in the company but never with BES as there was no point forking out for it but now that BES Express is on the go I can see us moving in that direction

 

1. Because Jim Balsillie is the Devil!!!

 

Take your Preds hat off.

 

At the moment we use a mixture of blackberry's and windows mobile devices.

Blackberry users seem to have problems with clendar invites going missing when synced up with outlook and the windows mobile devices need rebuilt every otherday.

We are now trying to go to iphones and this just keeps on getting delayed.

I am desktop support so dont have anything to do with the actual setting up of the servers or that, just the configuring of the actual device.

 

Dude, it's bonded there forever.

Besides, I know you understand... aren't you a Pens fan?

 

I've had the pleasure of being exposed to outfits on both sides of the fence
my last outfit three of us had blackberries outside the exec team, and we had to nag for those for months, and they were the first gen blackberries.. very un-userfriendly in this day and age

the outfit before that everyone in the company had a windows mobile device, they were nice, and the interface, whilst being clunky, was still far better than the blackberry experience

My current employer uses BES and blackberries, but allows us free reign really, I got fed up of carrying two phones so just plugged my iphone into activesync and use that solely

Blackberry adds very little value in the scope of things today, the majority of the tech that made them who they are is present out of the box in exchange, and their devices are still playing serious catchup to modern smart phones (the Storm is a good start)

The need for smart phones really depends on the type of work your staff do, I have plenty of clients where it's jut not warranted, but since I moved to consulting I have never been without one, and I couldn't imagine being without one in my personal life. the Mobile market place is an ever growing $100 billion market, and everyone wants a piece of it, blackberry will need to kick it up a notch to stay competitive, as the only reason I see them sticking around is high level buy in (the old guys at the top who can finally use a blackberry, don't quite want to give it up for something they have to re learn) I had a client the other week who got a new CEO and his first order was to get BES in replacing all the droids they have with blackberries, absolutely no technical or business justification other than 'that's what he was comfortable with' the joys of being the CEO :P

We shall see what Blackberry 6 has to offer I guess, and how new handsets compete with Windows 7 Mobile, iPhone OS 4.0 and the latest Android releases...

 

I currently own and use a blackberry bold and it has been okay so far. I must admit though that the scroll button is not one of the easiest to use as it just does it's own thing sometimes.

I have got some money tucked away so might look at investing in the HTC desire. Well, we'd see because gadgets and technology continuous evolvement is expensive business for the sole user

Basically, the ipad and the rest of it is just must have that shouldn't really be worded that way as it's not necessary for most people. This applies to me too, so don't know and can't speak for everyone else.

At work we issue blackberry handheld's to senior managers and team leaders and so far has been okay in terms of support etc. The Bes server just runs smoothly and only has to be restarted once is a blue moon.

My manager has recently got himself an iphone and is trying to get the business to move to iphone's on the grounds that you can do so much more on it. It would integrate nicely with Exchange server 2007 as well as have better and stronger security etc.

Well bless my manager but he is a gadget's person and likes these new toys like more people that like technology. The logic behind he's reasoning is understandable to me. Well which ever works better and cost being right is fine in my volcabury.

 

Is that the rollerball scroll thingy? I had to get my old work one replaced as that rollerball just died! I beleive they've replaced it with a touchpad sort of thing now!

 

OK, that guy in the link is talking pants.

I have deployed numerous BlackBerry Enterprise Servers and spend half my working life fixing issues with them. The encyption they use is either 3DES or DES depending on the method you select.

They are notoriously flaky and will only offer two advantages over a Windows Mobile Device which are:

- Remote Application Deployment (never had a client use it and we manage over 200 BlackBerry Enterprise Servers)
- BES 5.0 you can synch Exchange Public Folders which is a nice feature.

The downside of BlackBerry's (to name a few):

- Replication slow of none core items (Inbox & Sent) e.g. Deleted Items take upto 15 mins to synch.
- Underlying SQL database has tons of issues, delete a user then unable to add unless you run various commands e.g. osql -E to delete them manually.
- Wireless activation often fails and with BES Express 5, certain Vendors only allow USB activation!

However, you pay over the odds for the BES Server, the licenses and the tariffs.

With Exchange 2007 & 2010 with OMA, you can do the following:

- Wipe Handheld remotely
- Put in place Security Policies, e.g. PIN number to enter device, get this wrong x times and it wipes it.
- No extra costs except for data used on tariff.
- Simpler configuration and troubleshooting.