Hi folks:

I'm an IT consultant that works mostly with small businesses. I'm working on a larger client (for me), that wants to install SBS 2008 and go from a workstation to a domain environment. As part of that effort I bought myself a copy of SBS 2008 and installed it as a VM on one of my machines. Since it comes with Exchange 2007 I thought I'd migrate my personal email to Exchange (I run SMEServer now) so that I'd know how to do it when it came time to work with my customer on the email migration. As part of that effort I was toying with the idea of getting a blackberry and connecting it to Exchange.

My question, not having ever owned a blackberry, concerns what you get with the various data plans, versus running Blackberry Software Express, which is free for one user, on SBS 2008 alongside Exchange. I was looking at AT&T's offerings and I'm wondering if I have to pay extra for the BES service if I'm intending to run Software Express on my own network. I'm confused about whether or not if you get the basic data plan, what you are really getting is a connection to AT&T's proxy server only, and that you can't connect to whatever ports you want, including your own Software Express server. On the other hand, since it's my own network I'm connecting to I can do anything I want, within reason, to my own port numbers to get around some of those restrictions. I've read some threads about "MD5" access and such, but not being a blackberry expert I'm not quite sure what that all entails. Obviously, what I'd like is unrestricted port access to the internet, without going through a firewall or proxy server, but if that brings the data cost up from $30 per month to $50 per month, maybe I should just shelve the blackberry idea for the time being.

Thoughts and suggestions welcome.

mudtoe