[rliebsch]

I removed this rant from a question about subfolders. I put it here instead. Please comment liberally.

...
One thing that "bothers" me about Blackberry now is that people expect to have access to all their email and feature sets from the blackberry handheld.

This at a time when the mail storage quota policies have been abolished. We have users with upward of 5GB mail stored on the servers. And this has become the norm.

I really enjoy the blackberry and it has increased the productivity, functionality and workplace transparency of my userbase. However, the desire to have all email and access to all calendars from the handheld, i believe is slightly out of line with the design of the platform. Not to mention the memory mishaps with all the add on applications....

I think the blackberry was designed as a sort of touch stone, not as a micro sub sub compact replacement for the subcompact laptops and cellular broadband cards we provided you.

[JSanders]

Originally Posted by rliebsch

I think the blackberry was designed as a sort of touch stone, not as a micro sub sub compact replacement for the subcompact laptops and cellular broadband cards we provided you.

I could not have said it better. I agree

[ladydi]

haha. sounds like my sys admin wrote that! He calls them "toys" I think it would be sweet if the BB had most of the functionality of outlook, but I'm not holding my breath and my users are fairly accepting when I tell them something can't be done.

[rliebsch]

just out of curiousity. -- and I'm not being argumentative...

Define "outlook features."

the ability to access, on the fly, any message out of 60,000+
The ability to access calendars and inboxes of people to whom you are delegate?
The ability to access (soon to be removed) public folders?

That'd be great, it really would, but it would generate quite a load on the network and server. Which might push the lifestyle features off of the device.

And I am seeing more and more, as the Macintosh features get added to the blackberry -- music, photos, 3rd party apps, yahoo!, google suite, web browsing, etc -- the devices are starting to have some serious memory problems which hampers the core functionality of the device. Messages being purged from the device, call logs being truncated, etc...

It is the same thing with work laptops housing 100+ GB of music, photos, movies, from an end users personal life, and only 5 to 10GB of actual work...

Making consumer products out of enterprise tools.

If this is the way it is going to be, the hardware folks are going to have to really step it up. Super small outside, super fast and dense insides, as well as shock and water proof... --i've already replaced half a dozen pearls which were dropped from pockets or given a swim.

[Frank Castle]

Welcome to the overlap of work and home life balance. Workers want to have 24x7 flexability and expect the mobile experience to compare to their wired desktop one, which is unfair.

I look at mobility and think of when personal pc's first came into the workplace and did certain things .. I think the next 5 years will be a tremendous growth and the thought of what these devices will be able to do is excited.

But your right .. there is a balance between functionality and nice to have and I think the Iphone is the perfect example of that ... not to mention we are not on full 3G networks yet.

[rliebsch]

Even mobility is different now. I am typing this on a laptop with a cellular broadband card. I am an always on, always accessible, all seeing admin..

And about workers wanting 24x7 flexibility, I think workplace transparency benefits the employers and the organization moreso.

You come to the office at 10 you leave at 5. You start working at about 6am and you don't stop until about midnight. So you are in office 6 or so hours a day, but you produce off and on for 18hours or so....

I bet/hope there is more than 9 hours of productivity total in that span. And I'd wage there are more than 5 days of work in that week.

diminishing returns on salary. and workplace transparency. It is the new world order.

but that is a different rant....

Let's keep this lively. It is offtopic, concerns all of us and is terribly relevant. I am enjoying the different perspectives

[ladydi]

hearing you talk about workplace transparency tempts me to look for a job in the private sector. In Gov, everything is seperate. You are in the office 8-5 and when you go home, you are expected to forget about work. If you do work, you aren't compensated and god forbid, you skim off some time during the 8-5.

I would really love to be able to have 5-6 hour days in the office and work from wherever during the other hours. My bb allows me to do that to some degree because my boss is cool, but its really frowned on.

And as for the BB being able to do the job of a laptop while still fitting in your pocket, I can see it happening in the next 10 years or so as nano technology becomes more available.

[Frank Castle]

Ladydi .. well that stinks .. I have total flexibility to come and go as we are basically on call 24x7 on the messaging team. How do you manage patches / lab work .. I assume you need to do some things off hours?

Most days we're here regular 8 hour day but on weeks we have upgrades etc it's not uncommon to have days off or 4 hr days ..

No OT here either.

I think there are two sides to this conversation:

1. How these technoligies are changing how employee's are able to do their work / business gets done
2. How admins control / manage these infrastrucutures and allign them with the needs of #1

[rliebsch]

Workplace transparency also means you are expected to work off hours and any time. Double edged sword. Because you aren't compensated for it. Salary means you get the same pay for 30 hours that you do for 80 hours.

BB as a laptop: well, for Windows and Linux admins, Idokorro has Mobile Desktop supporting RDC and VNC and MobileSSH supporting SSH and Telnet. And if you have .Net they have some awesome admin utilities.

Managing the roaming users is easier and more complicated. Nice duality. Being cryptic today, I'll stop. I'm prepping for braving the iPhone aquisitions today...