[Mobilepartners] Clarification on BlackBerry Question

[Andrew Yu]

Greetings!

During the Community Forum yesterday, there was a question about using 
BlackBerry at MIT and whether IS&T will be supporting it. I wanted to 
clarify this a bit.

1. IS&T will not support BlackBerry devices at this time. If someone is 
considering purchasing a BlackBerry device, we recommend Windows Mobile 5 
devices such as T-Mobile Dash (which includes wi-fi), Motorola Q, Treo 
700wx, or Treo 750.

2. Why not?
Since IS&T (and most of MIT) does not use Microsoft Exchange (and hence 
cannot use BlackBerry Enterprise Server, BES), the usability of BlackBerry 
devices are limited. In a MS Exchange/BES environment, any change in your 
email (including subfolders), contacts, calendar, tasks, etc. is pushed to 
the device providing an excellent end-user experience which everyone else in 
the industry is trying to mimic. There are other useful remote device 
management features (e.g. remote device lock/kill/wipe, software updates, 
etc.) that is only available on a BES environment currently.

Without the BES, most BlackBerry users at MIT must select the BlackBerry 
Internet Service (a.k.a. BlackBerry Internet Email) offered by carriers. 
Using this method, MIT email can still be pushed to the device (every 15 
minutes). The down side of BIS/MIT's IMAP is that sometimes you will receive 
an old message as a "new" message appearing on your BlackBerry and you can 
only see the last 30 days of email (which may be adequate for most users). 
Another down side is that since MIT user name and password must be stored at 
a third-party location, this should be avoided for certain individuals who 
deals with sensitive information (it is about as risky as using Gmail).

3. TechTime on BlackBerry? (For those users at MIT that are married to 
BlackBerry)
Recently, I have confirmed that TechTime calendar synchronization works with 
SyncJe software with most of the new BlackBerry devices from all major 
carriers. While this is not the same as the BES environment, you can 
purchase and configure SyncJe software to sync TechTime Calendar 
consistently and without the problems that we saw with SyncML on the Palm 
OS*.

There is a documentation on Mobile Devices Wiki:
https://confab.mit.edu/confluence/display/MobileDevices/

4. Future?
Outside of MIT, BlackBerry platform is growing rapidly. Research In Motion 
is the company behind BlackBerry and their growth rate is phenomenal. They 
are outperforming even Apple in terms of stock performance (if you are 
intersted, do a stock chart comparison between RIMM/AAPL/PALM/NOK: 
http://tinyurl.com/3a9c7b).

Over the next two or three years, anything can happen and IS&T may revisit 
the BlackBerry question.

For now, please feel free to use Mobile Partners User Group and the Wiki 
mentioned above to discuss and share the information about BlackBerry.

Cheers,

Andrew

_______________________________
Andrew Yu
Mobile Devices Platform Coordinator
Information Services & Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Phone: 617-324-8985
Email: andrewyu at mit.edu