A new interesting offering from RIM, BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express. The way I read it (correct me if I am wrong), you can get a BES server, including one CAL, for FREE. You can buy additional licenses for a total of 15, before having to upgrade. Also included is two free months of Tx0 technical support.

This would be awesome for the small business with just one BlackBerry user. Or even the home techie that happens to run his/her own Exchange/Domino/GroupWise server.

If anyone gives it a go, let us know what your experiences are.

Well, I went through the steps to request BES Express (it states 'electronic fulfillment only'), but once the 'order' was 'placed', it didn't offer a download option. I figure I'll be sent instructions via email...

The really nice thing about this is the fact that this now offers a 'test bed' server. I really like that.

Indeed - got an email with link to product fulfillment...waiting for:

[edit]still waiting for download - have emailed ...

I wonder what this will do to the business of BES hosting services. I doubt this would drive any into chapter 11, but I imagine this could cause them to lose a few customers.

Well, the average joe user who would be utilizing those hosting services likely won't understand the concepts behind Active Directory or Exchange or the other services - and let's not forget about having an honest shop with licensed software and the hardware to go with it. I doubt it'll make much of a dent at all for these people.

...the side effect would be having a lot of homemade Microsoft administrators in the world ready to join the IT industry (tongue-in-cheek).

Perfect timing for us. I was deliberating over whether to buy the small business edition and upgrade later if I needed more than 15 users or go for the full edition now. From what I read, Express is really equivalent to the Small Business version.

and this would be good - or bad? lol



If anyone gets this downloaded, please post - I was unable to successfully download as either a user or an admin

I had no problem downloading it. Clicked on the link in the email, confirmed my registration info and started the download.

How long after you filled out the form did you get a confirmation email? It's been 2.5 hours now for me and still no confirmation (and nothing in the spam filter).

I received a link to the license and the download within 5 minutes of submitting my request. This is very cool.

Alright, just tried it again. I guess if this doesn't work, I'll use other information.

yep around 5 minutes.

BTW, the file I got was the same file as the BES trial download. Obviously different keys in the email though.

this one came through...

Thanks for the info!

I thought it might be my cutting edge XP SP2/IE 6.0 SP2 giving me grief, so tried another machine (XP SP1) - but no joy. Will try this later from home...

@ jibi - email came within 10 - 20 minutes in my case.

5 Minutes for me too.

Took 4 minutes to receive the email.

Does this now make me a BES Admin?

-MrKyoo

This is what I thought of right away too. Our company doesn't want to pay a test server license so this will help out tremendously.

Yep - once you've installed it, configured it, and get it working with a <insert choice of email server> server and a client device! lolol

i honestly hope we don't have some DIY BES 'administrators' posting on this sub-forum here soon...

but seriously, RTFM! it will make things REALLY easy (for you and our headaches on here from various posts) and you won't be the kid in the back of the room who ended up doing Step 100 on one of those 'follow-the-steps' tests when you really only had to do Step 2 and you were done.

what are most of you going to use it for? just wondering. i was thinking of getting it just to mess around with it.

Interesting. Please let us know how you all make out. I'm very interested in deploying this on my server.