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Rollout: RIM's BlackBerry Connect: Page 4 of 5

From an administration standpoint, BlackBerry Connect is hit or miss. It can do basic tasks, such as resetting device passwords, locking devices and performing remote wipes--important abilities, considering the likelihood that one of your users will lose a device sometime. BlackBerry Manager, the product's management interface, made most of these tasks easy, but we encountered one problem with remote wipe. Although that feature successfully restored the device to its factory settings, we were forced to uninstall and reinstall the BlackBerry Connect software both on our client PC and the Treo 650. This restore process should be a last resort in case a device is lost or stolen.

Policies? What Policies?

While BlackBerry Connect covers the basic IT administration roles, there are no IT policy features. BES can enforce a wide variety of IT policies, including many that businesses would find useful (for example, a password requirement or a cameras-prohibited policy). But none of these policies extends to devices running the BlackBerry Connect software.

BlackBerry Connect is useful for those who have Palm Treo 650 smartphones and want access to an existing BES architecture. It's also not a bad solution for small businesses, especially those that already own Treo 650s. RIM announced in March that it will offer BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express for free on the Internet with a single CAL (client access license) and an option to purchase up to 15 CALs; this gives RIM a slight price advantage over competitors. That said, if you're looking to deploy mobile e-mail from the ground up, consider running BES with BlackBerry handsets or handsets from other manufacturers combined with competing mobile groupware solutions. n

Sean Ginevan is a technology analyst with the Center for Emerging Network Technologies at Syracuse University. Write to him at [email protected].