[jbandy]

Has anyone seen a program that will allow the BES Server to track where all the registered blackberries are?

My blackberry users do a lot of service calls. What would be nice is if I could find a program that would launch on a desktop pc that would show the locations on a map for all the blackberries in our organization. If a call comes in, we could see who the closest person is.

Anyone know of a program that will do this?

[bertiebassett]

Not sure this is BB specific, lots of similar apps are out there in the market, plus you might want to custom integrate with your trouble ticket/engineer dispatch system. A general google on "Field Force Automation" will give you lots of hits back

If you look at the Blackberry Solutions Guide on the bb.com website that will give you lots of details of suppliers of FFA solutions for BB. Whether these have GPS built in at the moment I don't know but with the deployment of 8800's it's only a question of time.

IIRC RIM's implementation of GPS is user driven - ie. the user (or an app) nees to request their location - it's not possible for the server to ping a device and then get a location back directly..would be great for the "where did I leave my device question"..

OTOH the legal issues around "locating" people are usually a little complicated and vary by juridisdiction, for example Germany is lot hotter on it than the UK which is probably why RIM left this feature out at the moment.

What country are you in and then we might be able to help with more specific vendo info..

[Domel]

WoW this could be nice
I think that the biggest problem is the law because every device in internet or provider network can localized. Only the pointed area may be bigger or smaller.

[stuwhite]

Originally Posted by Domel

WoW this could be nice
I think that the biggest problem is the law because every device in internet or provider network can localized. Only the pointed area may be bigger or smaller.

Bertie is dead right about the legislation. I cut my telcoms teeth setting up vehicle and personal tracking stuff in the UK and you can't track anyone commercially or have any way of locating them without their knowledge, unless they agree in advance. Of course they never do so it so it's a very touchy subject here. I know in the US there is the whole "GPS chips in cellphones" thing due to DHS but I think that apart from that, the ability to locate a person without their consent is outloawed virtually everywhere. It will be nice to see what happens though as the 8800 is going to change the shape of personal tracking, methinks.

[jbandy]

Originally Posted by bertiebassett

Not sure this is BB specific, lots of similar apps are out there in the market, plus you might want to custom integrate with your trouble ticket/engineer dispatch system. A general google on "Field Force Automation" will give you lots of hits back

If you look at the Blackberry Solutions Guide on the bb.com website that will give you lots of details of suppliers of FFA solutions for BB. Whether these have GPS built in at the moment I don't know but with the deployment of 8800's it's only a question of time.

IIRC RIM's implementation of GPS is user driven - ie. the user (or an app) nees to request their location - it's not possible for the server to ping a device and then get a location back directly..would be great for the "where did I leave my device question"..

OTOH the legal issues around "locating" people are usually a little complicated and vary by juridisdiction, for example Germany is lot hotter on it than the UK which is probably why RIM left this feature out at the moment.

What country are you in and then we might be able to help with more specific vendo info..

We are in the states actually. Really don't need it to tie into a help desk program. We would just like a realtime map with where all of our gps enabled blackberries are.

[DarthBBerry]

Aligo

Just did a Google search.

[stuwhite]

Originally Posted by DarthBBerry

Aligo

Just did a Google search.

Well found Darth, nice stuff.

[mahoward]

This used to be called BlackBerry Tracker I believe.

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