I recently moved to my corporate BES and they pushed down an IT Policy to my BB8700 that disabled SMS. Now I use the BB as my personal phone, and my corporate communicator (email/calendar). I use SMS on a regular basis.. I know about teleflip.com, but are there any other services out there? I want the recipient to be able to respond back to me when I send them an SMS, which teleflip won't do (it shows my email address).

Any ideas anyone?

Thanks!

-thespian

Sorry, nothing you can do about it. Teleflip is your best alternative.

Thanks Doug.

Does anyone know or have experience with Blackberry Connect devices? My basic question is, can I just get a Sony or a Nokia with BB Connect, give my BES admin the PIN, and use that instead of my current BB? I presume email and calendar will work fine, but does any know if they can turn off SMS on this device too via an IT Policy?

Thanks!

You broke the #1 rule: Don't use your personal BB on a corporate BES

I agree, once you placed your personal BB on the corporate BES you lost all control of it, and not only now but likely for good even if you were to leave the company, since the likelyhood is that once that IT Policy is in place you will not be able to get all functions back, including but not limited to SMS and bluetooth in many cases.

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0) BlackBerry8700/4.1.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/102)

What rule is that? The point of the BB8700 is that it's finally a GREAT phone, along with one of the best screened BBs made. I don't want to carry 2 devices, that's the rule of technology consolidation,,,

The rule is that of your company. They control the BES. They can push an IT policy to any BES controlled BB. If you are a publicly traded US company, or a publiclaly traded company that does business in the US, you fall under SOX. The company is required to keep copies of every electronic message going theough the network. For BES 4.1, SMS can be looged. Prior to that, it was simpler to just disable SMS. That way, the only messaging option from the BB was through the corporate mail server.

Get you personal BB off of the corporate BES. make sure the IT policy gets cleaned off completely!! Get them to give you a BlackBerry on the corporate dime (with or without voice) and carry two devices.

Mixing personal and business property is never a good idea. Run far away. You've been warned.

Do you have access to your company email exchange account? If so then chances are you can activate a device yourself without using your IT guys. If you can get your new device to activate then look for a tread on removing the policy. Like Kontiki pointed out, you may or maynot regain all functionality when the policy is removed.

Thanks for the discussion everyone.. I have removed the Policy before, so I know if I want to remove myself, all will be well. However, I still don't want to carry 2 devices, so need another solution..

Back to my original question, anyone have experience with BB Connect (wondering if that's IT Policy enforceable as well)

I need to find out when we're moving to BES 4.1, as I'm not concerned with them logging me, I just want functionality.

Thanks.