I have an 8830 thru Verizon and I have BES service through my company.

I have found my company's Outlook to be a little unreliable; it loses random personal appts I enter.

My IT dept has no clue so I wonder if I can use BIS and manage my personal calendar and contacts separately from the BES?

If so how would I go about setting this up?

Thanks!

Brian

As an IT person, I always hate answering questions which start out by bashing other IT departments... but I digress.

Anyway... yes, you can likely manage your contacts and calendar outside of BES.
You just need to turn Wireless Synchronization off for both of them.
CHECK WITH YOUR IT DEPARTMENT FIRST. Make sure you're allowed to do this.
Since you're on their BES, you have to play by their rules.
They will know if you've disabled wireless sync, and you are subject to their wrath if they disapprove.

Install Blackberry Desktop Manager and set it up to sync with your local Outlook installation and you should be good to go.