It’s being reported that Blackberry (RIM) are having outages for the second time this week in the USA. This outage is also affecting South America.
That’s the problem with Blackberry. You are relying on a third party. I’m all for cloud computing but I’m not for “locked in” cloud computing like this. If you deploy Blackberry handsets then what alternative have you got?
If you’re running Exchange you’ve long since had the ability to do push email without the need to pay good money to someone else. Sure, Windows CE/Mobile handsets didn’t seem to compare too well. But that has changed big time. I’m using a small LG machine running Windows Mobile 6.5 and it’s usable, stable and has good battery life.
Way back when I was last an internal admin, we had Lotus Notes. I remember the call for email enabled handsets came along. We were a finance company and worried about where our data would be. Our email admin, a savvy Notes guru, took a lot of time and went with Windows XDA and XDA III handsets. Straight away the feedback came from directors who barely did email – that was dirty work for their PA’s. They couldn’t carry these handsets; they weren’t as pretty as the Blackberry’s that directors from other companies had. Ugh! Style instead of functionality.
So if style is your thing then you can even run iPhones with Exchange ActiveSync. And then you can annoy every person near you while you pretended that you invented the iPhone and show off every whizzbang feature that it has.
HTC, LG and Samsung all make very stylish Windows Mobile 6.5 handsets too and in various form factors. I quite like my LG. It’s the size of a normal phone (not a mini brick) and it has an attached stylus. I don’t have Exchange at home (I used to until Digiweb decided that they never game me a static IP address – I have the email to prove they did but their support chose to ignore that – and their website even used to advertise it) so I use other online email services. My primary one works perfectly with the LG. I even run both my personal email and my work email on it, both via IMAP.
So don’t let phone handsets decide the best way to make email available to your roaming workers. Don’t rely on 3rd parties. Just push the email from your own infrastructure. Then you can read about other people’s email issues in your working email.
The pros of backing this infrastructure off to a 3rd party is not having to allow external access from the Internet, for most larger businesses (especially in the finanacial sector) this is seen as a positive for RIM’s solution.
Also RIMs architecture allows for far more extensive policies to be deployed to the end device, Microsoft’s answer to this is to deploy MDM on top of Exchange which from past experience is much bigger solution than RIM’s BES server.