I am in the process of evaluating blackberry monitoring products and want to make sure I have exausted all my outlets. Rather than taking the sales reps word on how great their product is I would rather hear from the trenches on your experience with various vendors products and services.

What are you using for blackberry monitoring?
Do you like the product?
Does it work as advertised?
Do you have any concerns with the company that developed the product?
Overall value over Blackberry 4.0 server?
Any problems or products you would avoid and for what reasons.

I have narrowed my research down to 4 products if you have any feedback on these I would love to hear about it. Even if you feel the product serves no functional value in your mind over existing blackberry built in functions.

NeedText
GSX
Boxtone
Conceivium Mobile Monitor

From the four products you listed I only know 2 (Boxtone and Needtext), but I would also add www.berrynator.com to the list. From the white papers it has much more featuers than e.g. NeedText.

Looks interesting

I wish they had english screen captures to help you understand what your looking at.

Domino DDM for 7.0, Free and works amazing as long as you know what to do and how to code/find the right code you need.

I know what you mean.
I offered to develop an in house application using VB and ASP scripts however they want to go with a third party solution that will evolve with RIM and has an internal partnership. I can still develop it on the side and see where it goes but I kind of like the idea of not having the coding responsibility. Thier main concern is who would support it if I leave. I can agree with their logic.

MrMitchell~
We use the NeedText monitor in our environment. We just recently downloaded the newest version and are testing it out. However, our environment consists of this. We have 8 BES 4.0 servers. We are in an exchange 2k3 setup as well. We have remote users all over the US, and we have IT service managers in those areas. We have setup the Monitor for them to be able to check out users accounts. It tells them a little info, but not much. It is useful in the fact that it tells them which server they are on and then they let us know, so the turnaround time and fix is quicker for us and them. As far as support goes, NeedText seems to be pretty quick about resolving your issue in a timely manner. We have the monitor running on a Xeon 2.4, with 3.5Gig of RAM. Seems to respond pretty well. One of the downsides of the monitor is that only one person can log into at a time per ID. We have had to create 7 different ID's for our various users. And for us Level 4 support guys, it's difficult to know who's using it or not, so when someone logs in, it kicks you out. One good thing is the notification that gets sent to your BB if something happens with the server. We have saved some time knowing whether or not our server came back online or not. If it doesn't come back, we are able to contact the CORP server guys to look into the issue. I have not personally tested another program, so I can't tell you everything good/bad about NeedText. I will write more as I remember more or when issues come up. Oh, and we have 2300 users

Thanks for the info Im finding its pretty CPU intensive which concerns me. Overall how are you finding the products stability?

I kind of feel it needs more features. What I mean is a lot of these monitoring companies seem to just rely on the MIB from blackberry which is pretty simple in nature for monitoring ability. That doesnt really add functionality beyond the 4.0 software it will potentially feel even less when 4.1 arrives.

Anyone have any last words of comments on products they are using?

Domino 7, DDM

We have a Mix of both Exchange and Domino so Domino 7 DDM only solves half a problem.