I have ran across some difficult software in my life… teaching myself photoshop & SQL, learning autoCAD at a previous job, or even working with the Crestron proprietary automation software for my home. These are all “Elmo Learns to Read” compared to Blackberry’s latest bastard, BES 5.0.
In a world where most every other mobile device manufacturer has adopted activesync, making most admin’s life easier, Blackberry in their infinite wisdom has stuck with their own method of connecting to RIM devices.
Now I know what you’re saying, activesync can’t do what BES can, and you are right. You can’t lock down the camera, you can’t “brick” the device (wipe yes, but brick, no), you can’t scale your own policy to have the phone to do exactly what you need it to do. But for a non-government, non-research corporation like the one I work for, these features are useless. If it’s not easy to use and easy to administer, people aren’t going to use it. It’s no wonder RIM is losing marketshare to both apple and google-enabled phones at a dramatic rate.
So in our environment of 40 users, I have seen RIM devices fall from 15 total users back in 2008 to 5 in 2010 and now 4 as of this week. The majority of our employees favor both Apple and Android devices and from an administration perspective, make my life much easier. With Exchange 2010 I can manage my wireless users and their company data from the Exchange System Manager (ESM) much like we could with BES 4.x. With the move to Win2008 and Exchange 2010 I had to move our BES to the new 5.0 interface. This has been hell to say the least. In what takes 5 minutes to setup an activesync policy it took nearly 14 hours, 4 installs, and several calls to RIM to setup BES 5.0. This is without getting into the usual steps of BESAdmin Policy Permissions as much of that migrated forward from the previous Exchange2003/BES 4.x environment.
By no means am I a fanboy either. I personally use an iPhone 4 but it’s not God’s phone by any means either. I’m impressed the most the latest Android based phones and love the EVO and the Galaxy S. I advocate what is easy for the user to use, reliably works, and can be folded into our network with ease.
At the end of all of it, I have declared our office a non-RIM zone. We will continue to support our few RIM users remaining but we will no longer add any additional or replacement devices until RIM makes their products easier to use from both the user and the administrator side. Goodbye syncing issues, goodbye resending service books, goodbye goofy ‘sendas’ permissions, goodbye having to wipe a device to re-setup enterprise activation, and finally goodbye terrible trackball devices.
Image courtesy of zazzle
So do you sell insurance or are you an admin? It sounds like you don’t like learning new systems and take the “easy” road. 5.0 is easy but yes 5.0 isn’t the easiest and most intuitive piece of software but it’s designed for environments where there can be thousands of devices or scale so the capabilities are there. Use what you need and ignore the rest. Any good network administrator can get it running in under an hour. I’d like to see you try to manage thousands of devices with different versions through Activesync policies while still keeping your network secure. At least put in Good for Enterprise for the non BB users! It sounds like you have other issues. BB support can walk you through the install if you can’t figure it out in less than an hour. I moved our 80 users from Bes 4.x to Bes 5.x in less than an hour.
I’m currently using an iphone but miss my Blackberry’s superb communication software and security. I would like to take a piece of velcro and connect an iphone and a BB together for the ultimate device and am tempted to. I’m ready for the Playbook.
G
Look at you out of the gate with the assumptions and back handed slaps! LOL That’s ok, it’s the internet.
I am an admin (have been for 8 years now) but also have to hold an insurance license to cover some insurance e-commerce things I do here.
Easy would not be a word that I would use in the same sentence with Blackberry and I used to be BB whore. I LOVED my BB. Where are the days when we had BES 3.x or 4.x with a great UI? Why this crappy “web” interface? Why does it take 10 minutes to reboot a device? I’m the king of trying new things out when it comes to software and hardware but I do not like to take 2 steps back in terms of functionality. A device should be easier to use with time, not the other way around. It’s not just me either, look at how many whitepapers BB has had to write to cover BES/Exchange integration issues or the 1000′s of forum posts about BES permission issues and not being able to sendas or be able to edit that part of your AD structure because you DCpromo’d from 2003.
I was on support multiple times with RIM for several hours and was eventually told, “just uninstall and reinstall it.”
I want to like BB/RIM because of the security. I am obsessed with how granular you can get with your policies to cover sensitive data and company-owned hardware. Unfortunately though, it’s just eating too much of my time to support it any further. I guess in short I’m disappointed more than anything in RIM. They’ve nailed if not set the standard for this stuff forever.
It’s not all green grass and sunshine either on any other device… but that’s another blog post.
Yeah, what Leif said. I had an MS update kill my BES install about 6 months ago…to the point where RIM told me that I should reinstall Exchange.
Much, much easier to tell my remaining single BB user that it was iPhone time.
If I worked for a larger corporation, we’d have a dedicated BB server and all kinds of infrastructure and personnel to support BES. But it’s a small shop, and it’s only me and my Exchange 2003 server.
Oh, and I’m also an insurance IT guy, FWIW.
-Jeff