Posted on April 28, 2010, at 12:26 PM .
Mimecast has announced the availability of a cloud-based service that emulates the information on the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) and ensures employees can access information on their BlackBerry, even if RIM is experiencing an outage. This is the first cloud service to protect against BES failures, and it challenges RIM’s message that BES is totally reliable. Mimecast Continuity Services are aimed at delivering email, and taking away the need for standby servers.
We know that RIM has experienced outages in the past, but overall the service is very reliable. It will be interesting to see what organizations are reaching out to this service, as these users need a level of service that RIM isn’t providing.
Read Mimecast’s press release for more information.
Posted on February 17, 2010, at 6:07 PM .
I’ve been chatting about the BES Express announcement with Ahmed Datoo of Zenrprise lately and I thought I would highlight some discussion points that haven’t been brought up yet. The BES Express announcement from RIM is very much a recognition from RIM that consumer smartphones are entering the enterprise market. The background to this announcement is centered on a shift in the enterprise world of corporate liable devices to employee liable devices. For those unfamiliar with the terms:
Corporate liable – The company distributes the BlackBerry and is responsible for the cost and maintenance of the device. Generally, this device is locked down and restricted, so as to minimize cost and security risks to the organization.
Employee liable – The device is purchased by the employee, and brought into the organization. This device may or may not be compatible with the network, and it’s up to executive management and the IT department whether or not said device will be allowed.
Continue reading this article
Posted on February 15, 2010, at 2:53 PM .
There have been a lot of rumors circulating about RIM’s big announcement and most of them point to RIM offering an inexpensive and watered down version of BES to BIS customers. The upcoming services will be aimed at giving out some of the enterprise functionality such as OTA sync, backup and restore and well as remote data wipe. Click through for the rumored details of the announcement.
Continue reading this article
Posted on December 23, 2009, at 1:40 PM .
Click to enlarge the image
BoxTone have provided CIO with the details as to what happened during the BlackBerry outage. According to BoxTone, the problems began between 3PM and 4PM EST. BlackBerry Messenger and BIS internet browsing outages were quickly reported around the web.
Between 6:30 and 7:00 PM, the problem extended to BES email, preventing the delivery of emails for anyone on a BES. BoxTone began noticing a large increase in messages pending, and generated a warning alert before their customers flooded them with calls. BoxTone also placed all affected BES and Carriers in a Critical state on their customers’ Operations Dashboards (depicted by the red dots next to each BES and carrier). The steady growth in Pending Messages beginning around 6:45 continued until the issue was resolved early this morning. From their monitoring data, it appears that BES were able to communicate with the RIM NOC throughout the outage; however, the NOC was unable to deliver messages.
At about 12:09AM, BoxTone detected a brief disconnect in teh SRP connection of each BES to the NOC; it appears RIM reset the NOC SRP connection to complete their fixes. Following this reset, delivery of BES mail resumed.
By 2:45 AM or earlier, BoxTone detected that most customers’ email and services were back to normal and the backlog of pending emails had been delivered. BoxTone generated notifications informing their users that their service levels had returned to normal and updated the status of the BES and carriers to Normal.
Overall, this outage seems to have lasted around 7 hours. Thankfully, it wasn’t during peak hours, or this could have seriously impacted the working day. I hope RIM does a much better job of fixing these outages because 7 hours is way too long.
Posted on December 11, 2009, at 3:49 PM .
Ryan let us know that BES is now fully supported on Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and BlackBerry Technical Support Services are readily available.
In order to enable full support, three updates are required:
For more information, check out the Microsoft Exchange Team Blog.
Posted on November 30, 2009, at 2:43 PM .
RIM have released Service Pack 1 for BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0 for Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Domino. While BES 5.0 was an exciting launch back at WES 2009, many of the enterprise users we spoke to said they would wait for SP1 before buying, because they wanted to make sure RIM had gone through the first wave of feedback and bugs.
New to BES 5.0 with Service Pack 1 includes:
- BlackBerry device dashboard – Use the device dashboard to access the BlackBerry Monitoring Service which is now mobile friendly.
- Enhancements to the BlackBerry Administration Service – You can better manage user accounts, navigate search results and you can view user account info when add and manage apps.
- Enhancements to the BlackBerry Monitoring Service homepage – The homepage has been enhanced so you can view performance data and user statistics, graphs, messaging server mappings and overview info for BES components that are associated with all BES instances that the BMS monitors.
- Enhancements to the calendar sync process – You can now run a calendar sync process on a BES instance to find and correct differences between the calendar entries on the device and the desktop.
- More language support – BES is now available in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Japanese.
- Support for importing WiFi profiles and VPN profiles from a .CSV file – You can add, delete, or update the WiFi profiles and VPN prfiles that you assign to user accounts by importing a .csv file.
- Support for Microsoft SQL Server 2008.
Click here to download the full release notes for BES for Microsoft Exchange.
Click here to download the full release notes for BES for IBM Lotus Domino.
