TAG | BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0 on track to return on investment |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Sunday, 15 February 2009 | |
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Page 3 of 4 BES 5.0 now supports different level of user access. It’s not just the IT team who can administer the BES. Perhaps the thought of anyone else doing it scares you (and rightly so) but it will now be possible to grant select users a degree of access to the BES, over a specific subset of handhelds.Featured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
The people who you assign responsibility to may still be technical staff; you could possibly implement a hierarchical level of support for different departments or internal help desk support levels. I’ve save this one to now, but a fifth new feature is undoubtedly very exciting. I touched on it above when referring to new facilities that let applications be pushed out or modified on schedule. Yes, it’s the impending BlackBerry Application Storefront (BAS?) which perhaps attempts to reproduce the success of Apple’s AppStore for the iPhone (and iPod Touch.) RIM will be unveiling the storefront soon, and consequently BES 5.0 will provide a vast range of controls allowing administrators to control just how little or how much their users can do with it. Users who are particularly troublesome and always getting themselves in trouble may find their freedom on the storefront is reduced, or that applications they install might not have permission to access phone information or GPS location information. While users may resent such constraints on their freedom, it is important to remember that BlackBerry units in an enterprise have to perform, and that there are costs associated, not to mention responsibilities with respect to personal usage or engaging in harmful or mischievous activities. While an individual user may be willing to experiment and re-setup their BlackBerry if they trash it, businesses can’t tolerate tinkerers mucking up their device and consuming time to have it repaired. And the finance team won’t be happy to find a charge on the corporate bill because someone purchased a fart app. Behind the scenes, Panezic says this particular new feature took a lot of work to get going properly. RIM had a lot to consider. Software has to trickle to the device wirelessly in a reliable manner, despite handhelds going in and out of phone coverage, being switched off, being busy, networks having outages and more. Further, an individual piece of software might have necessary dependencies – which means something else must be downloaded and installed first. Not only that, the device might not even have enough memory for the new software. There were many important matters that RIM worked on to make sure admins have a simple and seamless experience, knowing they can push apps to any number of handhelds with confidence it will just work. Let me tell you one more. And when’s it coming out? |
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