indufan

http://www.engadgetmobile.com/2008/0...ices-are-down/

I have been anxiously awaiting the arrival of a Curve for Verizon (I hope it comes), but things like this make me wonder about the technology.

malap

I am not sure I understand why Blackberries need a special infrastructure...

I just purchased a BlackJack2 and our IT department will soon set us up with direct connection to our Exchange server via MS Push. Unless I am missing something, my setup won't need to go through any dedicated infrastructure... as long as I have Edge or 3G coverage, and as long as my Exchange server is up, I will be able to get emails.

Can someone explain the reason behind the need of a Blackberry infrastructure?

haveric

My Gmail was working fine today on the Blackberry, but none of my work mail came through...

ArizonaGuy

It's great how the promise that it won't happen again was broken.

I'm also amused that such a large part of corporate America plus a lot of general consumers can be shut down due to a single company's problem. Potentially such a problem could impact crackberry customers on a global scale.

Define single point of failure. Also, this is somehow more stable than corporations allowing secure connections directly to their own networks?

Dodge DeBoulet

Yes. Do a little research on what BES provides in both security and control of the handheld devices, and I think you'll find that there's a significant advantage.

An outage is one thing. The loss of highly proprietary information is something entirely different and potentially much more damaging.

FLYaway3x

From what I understand all users were affected, on BES or not.

That being said, BES is one if the key items which makes Blackberry so reliable and secure. No other company can compete.

Employees are in breach of IT security policies at our company if they forward mail to another account (gmail, etc). Blackberries allow us to have our own IT policies reflected on a wireless device.

Emma65

Oh dear. Anyone know if iphone is available in Canada yet? I'm planning to move there. I already have a rogers account. Was going to add blackberry support to it while I'm over in March. I wouldn't mind switching over to iphone if need be.

/E

Somewhere Over the Atlantic

If you mean adding Blackberry support to an iPhone, I don't believe that's possible. You need a Blackberry-branded device to get Blackberry service, regardless of the wireless carrier offering it.

SNA_Flyer

Not true. Do a search for "Blackberry Connect"

Emma65

No, I'm asking if the iphone and iphone service is available in Canada.

Robbiedeluxe

ArizonaGuy

I'm quite familiar with BES. I helped setup and maintain one in a Lotus Domino 5.x environment years ago.

But my question / point was somewhat facetious, since it's clear so much of the business world is relying on one vendor. I'm also familiar with Good Technology as well and I feel it's a viable alternative for corporate push email.

Bytepusher

Not yet but it is expected soonish

However there is a lot of FUD being slung around here. Blackberry has had 2 or three major outages in 10 years of service, even if you only look at the last 12 months the reliability is still in excess of 99.9%

Despite the reports of this as a complete outage my blackberry never stopped getting mail.

Things will have get somewhat worse before I switched horses to a comparatively unknown quantity.

willyroo

Except they've just pulled Symbian support...

sbm12

It is hard to know where Good is going to end up since the Motorola purchase. Still, when their v3 came out is was miles ahead of BES, with full two-way sync of email, calendar, contacts, notes and tasks, while BES only did email and calendar. Good was also first to offer OTA provisioning, though BES was only a couple months behind on that one as well. As RIM comes up with broader device support and Good trails in actual functionality at the hands of poor battery life from the Windows-based devices BES is going to pull away overall, I think. Nokia also has an interesting product based on Intellisync ported over to work wirelessly. I played with it a bit on the 9300s a year or so ago and it was OK, but not as feature-rich as Good/BES. Of course, it did have evevn broader device support than Good, as well as a ton of device control/management options that we didn't really get in to in our testing, but it was pretty ornery to get installed and running, and the provisioning process for devices was a nightmare relative to the Good/BES options.

S.