[SUFan]

We are currently using Notifylink with a mixture of Blackberry's and Treo's. Plan on evaluating BES Server for GroupWise. Anyone using this yet and are there any major issues?

Also, anyone know if RIM will support non-blackberry devices with BES in the future?

[bfrye]

I've been using it for about 4-5 months now, and am very pleased. We were on NotifyLink as well and have had nothing but problems with it for the last year. Attachment support has been marginal at best, and we had to increase our polling time to more than 30mins with NL to get reliable service.

GW BES, while it still has our problems, is worth the risk in my opinion. Emails are tranferred instantly, while changes (read/deleted) are updated every 20 minutes. In effect, it basically turns my blackberry into another desktop client, mirroring calendar, tasks, memos and emails.

We've had a few problems, such as global address book lookups not working, a few SRP problems and some occasional crashes, but most of these should be fixed with SP1 coming out in the near future.

We are very pleased with the operation of BES over the alternative, and would definately recommend it to aspiring customers.

If you would like more info on it, feel free to PM me and I'll send you what I can.

[SUFan]

Thanks for the reply - Our e-mail admininistrator will be glad to hear about your reply and we may take you up on your offer for more information.

Yes, the NotifyLink has been very problematic but we were trying to support multiple devices. It does seem more stable when used with Blackberry's as opposed to Treos and MS Phones.

I will probably make the decision to require users to go with a Blackberry if they want this functionality and just deal with the nay-sayers. Trying to support multiple devices on multiple carriers has been extremely support intensive.

Thanks again.

[bfrye]

That's exactly what we did. Pulled all our non-blackberry devices in and switched the users over. And actually everyone has been pleased over the switch as well. Even those switching from nice color palm-type devices to 6230 blackberries.

[jibi]

To add, RIM is planning on supporting non-RIM handhelds with their BlackBerry Connect and BlackBerry Built-In platforms. The Treo 650, for example, will be a BlackBerry Connect device, in the future (final stages of beta testing are underway now). You have the Nokia Communicator 9300 (I think thats the model), as well as quite a few others that will also be BlackBerry-enabled. The North American market was being held back from the non-RIM BlackBerry handhelds due to a legal battle over patent rights between RIM and NTP. That case has finally been settled and licensing for major manufacturers such as palmOne, Siemens, Nokia, Motorola, etc are now underway...

So basically, you're probably looking at 3-6 months before you start seeing a few of these initial offerings popping up in North America. Within the year, they will be fairly abundant.

[bfrye]

Just curious Jibi, will IT Policies still be applicable with non-BB devices?

[jibi]

not really sure. it all depends on the capability of the BBC/BBBI implementation. with the latter, i would imagine it would still be implemented, perhaps in a limited format. with Connect, i would imagine that it would not be implemented, or would be limited to the application itself.

[bfrye]

Wow. I can see why they would release Connect for other platforms, but I'm surprised they wouldn't at least use some modified form of the host OS to implement at least a portion of these features. It could really throw a hamper on BES' security model when not used with a RIM device.