For Business Use, the Choice Is Clear

Since then the reach of the BlackBerry smartphone has extended well beyond its Wall Street roots and is now firmly entrenched in Main Street, as virtually anytime, anywhere access has become the norm and not the exception. RIM now has more than a dozen smartphone models on the market and a base of loyal subscribers that is currently in the neighborhood of 16 million—and growing2 . In June 2008 the company reported quarterly revenue of $US 2.24 billion, more than double its intake over the same quarter in 20073 and proof that its trendy toy has fundamentally changed our relationship with email. And if that’s not enough to convince naysayers of the device’s mass appeal, just ask Madonna, who earlier this year admitted to Elle magazine that she sleeps with hers under her pillow.

BlackBerry® Internet Service vs. BlackBerry® Enterprise Server

While the BlackBerry solution is now a household name, what is less well known is that there are two main BlackBerry smartphone mobile connectivity options, and they are quite different. The first is the BlackBerry Internet Service, in which your mobile carrier acts as a liaison between your email and your BlackBerry smartphone. The second option is to use a BlackBerry Enterprise Server, which directly links your wireless device to your email, contacts, calendars and business applications— virtually automatically and almost instantly.

If you’re using a BlackBerry smartphone solely for personal email, then a BlackBerry Internet Service account is all you need, and you can stop reading here. But if you’re a business user and are only using BlackBerry Internet Service, you’re leaving lots of important functionality unused.

For example:

Integration with corporate messaging and collaboration platforms

Unlike the BlackBerry Internet Service offering, which is a standalone service, a BlackBerry Enterprise Server seamlessly integrates with any of the top three “messaging and collaboration” platforms, also known more generically as email servers: Microsoft Exchange/Outlook, IBM Lotus Domino and Novell GroupWise. With a BlackBerry Enterprise Server, the data from these platforms is accessible directly from the BlackBerry smartphone, which enables near real-time mobile access to corporate data and applications—and greatly improved employee productivity.

As an example let’s take Microsoft Exchange/Outlook, the industry’s leading email, calendaring and unified messaging server, with more than 65 percent of the market. By integrating directly with an Exchange server, a BlackBerry Enterprise Server can significantly improve internal communication and collaboration by allowing BlackBerry smartphone users to wirelessly synchronize email, calendars, address books, tasks and memos. You can also access email addresses and distribution lists that are stored in your company’s global address list, not just your individual contact list. So if you’re in the airport in Hong Kong and want to look up the email address of a coworker in London, you can. And any new contacts you create in Outlook or on the BlackBerry smartphone will automatically sync back and forth, which means no USB connections, no cradles, no manual entry in multiple locations. If you have more than one computer running Outlook, the BlackBerry Enterprise Server syncs them all with your BlackBerry smartphone, wirelessly and automatically.

Users can also remotely check other employees’ availability on their calendars from their BlackBerry smartphone before submitting meeting requests, eliminating the frustrating back-and-forth that often occurs when trying to find a time for busy execs to get together. And if one party makes a change to his/her calendar using a BlackBerry smartphone or PC, the information is almost instantly synced back to the desktop or BlackBerry smartphone in virtual real time, wirelessly and automatically.

A BlackBerry Enterprise Server can also integrate seamlessly with Microsoft’s popular Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS), which allows employees to communicate in real time using instant messaging and voice chat. Smart “presence capabilities” built into OCS identify the best application for users to reach each other at any given moment. With a BlackBerry Enterprise Server, users can use OCS on their BlackBerry smartphone to communicate in real time with other BlackBerry smartphone users (in the same company), as well as with employees using OCS from their desks. OCS also unifies all communication in a secure, easy-to-search archive that is fully integrated with Microsoft Exchange/Outlook and accessible via BlackBerry smartphones.

Integration. Automation. Synchronization. In other words, a BlackBerry Enterprise Server allows anyone using a major mail server, which represents a significant portion of the U.S. (and global) workforce, to do pretty much anything on their BlackBerry smartphone that they can do on the desktop, virtually no matter where they are.

Security

Security is a significant area of concern for anyone in charge of IT for any size business, with numerous research studies indicating that threats to corporate email networks—from all angles—are on the rise. The U.S. Treasury Department has reported that the cybercrime industry has passed illegal drug sales in annual proceeds, and security vendors Websense and MX Logic claim that up to 90 percent of all email is now spam, the gateway of choice for cyber bandits looking to steal sensitive personal and corporate data from unsuspecting recipients. McAfee publicly called 2007 a “malware epidemic” in which a new driver appeared every four minutes, and a May 2008 report by Osterman Research reported a 35 percent increase in Web-based malware during April 2008 alone.

While getting a good night’s sleep is a luxury for many of today’s IT administrators and small-business owners, there are three critical security features of a BlackBerry Enterprise Server that will certainly help reduce their stress regarding the security of mobile access to email and other data and applications. The first is end-to-end encryption of email messages—from the BlackBerry Enterprise Server to the BlackBerry smartphone and back. RIM utilizes standards-based transport encryption technology, Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Triple Data Encryption Standard (Triple DES), for all data transmitted between BlackBerry Enterprise Server and BlackBerry smartphones. This encryption helps to protect the messages at every step, a feature that isn’t available with the company’s BlackBerry Internet Service. The encryption for email messages sent via BlackBerry Internet Service is subject to the existing or available security models. For those users who exchange sensitive or private corporate information o
ver email, this is a critical feature that is only available on the BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

The second key security feature of a BlackBerry Enterprise Server is what’s called “remote lock and wipe,” which allows the administrator to easily erase the contents of any BlackBerry smartphone on the network and also lock it down so no one can use it—a handy option if a BlackBerry smartphone is lost or stolen. Back in 2001 the U.K.

Register reported that in London alone more than 61,000 mobile phones had been left in cabs in the previous six months, and a 2002 survey by mobile security firm Pointsec claimed that six percent of IT and sales staff admitted to losing a personal digital assistant (PDA). Given those numbers and the steady growth of mobile devices year after year, it’s a safe bet that the number of BlackBerry smartphones left in cabs, airports and restaurants each year around the world is significant.

The third area of security focuses on policy management and enforcement. Different wireless users within an organization have different requirements for security and access to information. One size no longer fits all. To meet this challenge, the BlackBerry Enterprise Server enables administrators to deploy group policies that reflect the needs of the various users and teams within an organization. Each BlackBerry smartphone, on activation, is added to a customizable base IT policy to ensure a minimum level of security. From this starting point, administrators can create user groups and easily modify policies to meet the security needs of the organization. All policy settings are synchronized and assigned to the BlackBerry smartphone over the air. As a result, BlackBerry Enterprise Server administrators who need to facilitate large deployments can easily change IT policies on a corporate level without requiring users to cradle their BlackBerry smartphones.

With the BlackBerry Enterprise Solution®, IT policies are one-way, server-initiated outbound communications. This ensures that administrators can control each BlackBerry smartphone reliably, with complete confidence that the device is compliant — users can’t intervene or prevent a policy from being applied once the administrator has initiated it. As well, IT policies carry unique digital signatures to ensure that only the designated BlackBerry Enterprise Server can send updates to a BlackBerry smartphone.

Simple Management

Many smaller organizations don’t have any trained IT professionals on staff, and if they do, supporting an email server is just one more thing on a huge list of items the IT team (which is quite often just one person) has to handle. As mentioned earlier, these busy individuals are often strapped and stressed out, so a BlackBerry Enterprise Server solution can be a breath of fresh air. While it does require some regular attention if it is managed in-house, a BlackBerry Enterprise Server is easy to connect to an Exchange server and is relatively straightforward to manage from there on out.

Push vs. Pull

In the “pull” environment of BlackBerry Internet Service, your mobile carrier‘s BlackBerry Internet server periodically checks your mail server for new messages, pulls them up to the BlackBerry Internet Service using a standard POP3 connection, and then pushes the messages out wirelessly to your BlackBerry smartphone. While you can schedule this to happen at regular intervals, the extra step of having to retrieve (pull) the messages inevitably slows the process down, so real-time email just isn’t possible.

The same is true with sending emails from your BlackBerry smartphone. While your device pushes any emails you send to your mobile carrier’s BlackBerry Internet Service servers, in virtual real time, you will have to wait until the next time the BlackBerry Internet Service connects with your mail server for each message to actually be sent out over the Internet to its recipient.

In a “push” environment, the BlackBerry Enterprise Server is integrated with your company’s email server (assuming you have one) and pushes your email out to your BlackBerry smartphone — almost instantly and automatically.

It’s so fast that sometimes messages will show up on your BlackBerry smartphone before they show up on your desktop. If you’ve ever received someone’s reply to a group email before you received the original message, there’s a good chance there’s a “sent from my wireless BlackBerry smartphone” beneath that person’s signature.

It goes without saying that email has fundamentally changed the way we do business, and with Gartner Group claiming that 80 percent of business people now believe email to be more valuable than the phone for business communications, the difference between a push and pull environment can be significant.

Conclusion

The simplest way to explain the difference between a BlackBerry Internet Service and a BlackBerry Enterprise Server is that a BlackBerry Internet Service solution extends personal email to your BlackBerry smartphone. It works great, and if that’s all you need, then that’s all you should buy. A BlackBerry Enterprise Server solution, on the other hand, is an extension of all the features of your corporate messaging platform to your BlackBerry smartphone, which makes it a powerful tool for boosting individual productivity, as well as for fostering collaboration among employees—whether they are down the hall or across the world.

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Research In Motion (RIM) is a leading designer, manufacturer and marketer of innovative wireless solutions for the worldwide mobile communications market.

Through the development of integrated hardware, software and services that support multiple wireless network standards, RIM provides platforms and solutions for seamless access to time-sensitive information including email, phone, text messaging (SMS and MMS), Internet and intranet-based applications.

BlackBerry®, RIM®, Research In Motion® and related trademarks, names and logos are the property of Research In Motion Limited and are registered and/or used in the United States and countries around the world. Used under license from Research In Motion Limited.

About Intermedia

Intermedia is the leading provider of hosted Exchange to small and medium businesses. With eight years of experience, and more than 300,000 mailboxes under management, Intermedia has the expertise to deliver Exchange email and collaboration solutions that are as good, if not better and more secure than in house solutions. Learn more at www.intermedia.net

1. Research In Motion Press Release, December 21, 2005
2. Research In Motion Press Release, June 25, 2008
3. Ibid