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When Research In Motion’s (RIM’s) BlackBerry® smartphone first hit the market in 2002, it quickly became a favorite accessory of busy Wall Street executives who were suddenly able to access their email—not to mention applications, games and the Internet— from virtually anywhere. And they did so with fervor. By 2005 the company had more than four million subscribers1 , and the BlackBerry smartphone had become an absolute must-have for anyone with an MBA.
Since then the reach of the BlackBerry smartphone has extended well beyond its Wall Street roots and is now firmly entrenched in Main Street, as virtually anytime, anywhere access has become the norm and not the exception. RIM now has more than a dozen smartphone models on the market and a base of loyal subscribers that is currently in the neighborhood of 16 million—and growing2 . In June 2008 the company reported quarterly revenue of $US 2.24 billion, more than double its intake over the same quarter in 20073 and proof that its trendy toy has fundamentally changed our relationship with email. And if that’s not enough to convince naysayers of the device’s mass appeal, just ask Madonna, who earlier this year admitted to Elle magazine that she sleeps with hers under her pillow.
BlackBerry® Internet Service vs. BlackBerry® Enterprise Server
While the BlackBerry solution is now a household name, what is less well known is that there are two main BlackBerry smartphone mobile connectivity options, and they are quite different. The first is the BlackBerry Internet Service, in which your mobile carrier acts as a liaison between your email and your BlackBerry smartphone. The second option is to use a BlackBerry Enterprise Server, which directly links your wireless device to your email, contacts, calendars and business applications— virtually automatically and almost instantly.
If you’re using a BlackBerry smartphone solely for personal email, then a BlackBerry Internet Service account is all you need, and you can stop reading here. But if you’re a business user and are only using BlackBerry Internet Service, you’re leaving lots of important functionality unused.
For example:
Integration with corporate messaging and collaboration platforms
Unlike the BlackBerry Internet Service offering, which is a standalone service, a BlackBerry Enterprise Server seamlessly integrates with any of the top three “messaging and collaboration” platforms, also known more generically as email servers: Microsoft Exchange/Outlook, IBM Lotus Domino and Novell GroupWise. With a BlackBerry Enterprise Server, the data from these platforms is accessible directly from the BlackBerry smartphone, which enables near real-time mobile access to corporate data and applications—and greatly improved employee productivity.
As an example let’s take Microsoft Exchange/Outlook, the industry’s leading email, calendaring and unified messaging server, with more than 65 percent of the market. By integrating directly with an Exchange server, a BlackBerry Enterprise Server can significantly improve internal communication and collaboration by allowing BlackBerry smartphone users to wirelessly synchronize email, calendars, address books, tasks and memos. You can also access email addresses and distribution lists that are stored in your company’s global address list, not just your individual contact list. So if you’re in the airport in Hong Kong and want to look up the email address of a coworker in London, you can. And any new contacts you create in Outlook or on the BlackBerry smartphone will automatically sync back and forth, which means no USB connections, no cradles, no manual entry in multiple locations. If you have more than one computer running Outlook, the BlackBerry Enterprise Server syncs them all with your BlackBerry smartphone, wirelessly and automatically.
Users can also remotely check other employees’ availability on their calendars from their BlackBerry smartphone before submitting meeting requests, eliminating the frustrating back-and-forth that often occurs when trying to find a time for busy execs to get together. And if one party makes a change to his/her calendar using a BlackBerry smartphone or PC, the information is almost instantly synced back to the desktop or BlackBerry smartphone in virtual real time, wirelessly and automatically.
A BlackBerry Enterprise Server can also integrate seamlessly with Microsoft’s popular Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS), which allows employees to communicate in real time using instant messaging and voice chat. Smart “presence capabilities” built into OCS identify the best application for users to reach each other at any given moment. With a BlackBerry Enterprise Server, users can use OCS on their BlackBerry smartphone to communicate in real time with other BlackBerry smartphone users (in the same company), as well as with employees using OCS from their desks. OCS also unifies all communication in a secure, easy-to-search archive that is fully integrated with Microsoft Exchange/Outlook and accessible via BlackBerry smartphones.
Integration. Automation. Synchronization. In other words, a BlackBerry Enterprise Server allows anyone using a major mail server, which represents a significant portion of the U.S. (and global) workforce, to do pretty much anything on their BlackBerry smartphone that they can do on the desktop, virtually no matter where they are.
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