Blackberry Admins - a question?

[Ordinary_Chap]

paddyhasneeds said:

Sucks that this is so difficult to prove - the idea of being able to say "our data bills will be a third less" is clearly appealing, but if there's little to back it up, and the things use more data to begin with because they're "always on" it seems the data bills could increase, so we'd want to understand that a little better.

One thing I forgot to ask, and not a show stopper but I believe you can't do tethering with Blackberry, at least not in a simple, supported way?

I was under the impression tethering is controlled by the operator? There's tethering apps for bb but you may get into hot water if your operator stipulates you are not allowed.

As for BB data most business devices I see use anything from 2mb to 100mb a month, it's quite difficult to get above that unless you're doing something out of the ordinary and I never see a BB using even 70% of that of other smartphones and I work in the industry.

Is this any help?
http://blogs.consumerreports.org/electronics/2010/...

[DPX]

Blackberrys , things have move on from what is a vt100 in gui . Terrible things .

[paddyhasneeds]

Thanks for that link, quite interesting. I may be being a little paranoid on the data side of thing. I've had zero involvement in our current mobile contract but I know one of our guys managed to run up a £1000 data bill. I don't know how and my first question was "How the fk are we on a contract that let's someone do that?", but that side of things isn't my call, I'm just trying to get us the right balance of what my users want and what I (as an IT admin) want.

[paddyhasneeds]

DPX said:

Blackberrys , things have move on from what is a vt100 in gui . Terrible things .

I don't follow?

[paddyhasneeds]

Incidentally, and I may have asked this in the past, but what do you all do about allowing people to use their personal phones with things such as Activesync?

I'm not particularly paranoid about over-the-air security as we use SSL, but I am conscious that it's easy to download a bunch of corporate data to a device we have no control over.

When we discuss it "the business" may just decide "no non-corporate devices" but personally I'd be interested in a safe/simple option for those who did wish to do so, but I don't really want to open the floodgates and end up supporting a myriad of versions of iOS, Android, Symbian etc.

[Ordinary_Chap]

paddyhasneeds said:

Thanks for that link, quite interesting. I may be being a little paranoid on the data side of thing. I've had zero involvement in our current mobile contract but I know one of our guys managed to run up a £1000 data bill. I don't know how and my first question was "How the fk are we on a contract that let's someone do that?", but that side of things isn't my call, I'm just trying to get us the right balance of what my users want and what I (as an IT admin) want.

Well RIM provide you with a platform you can control datawise. So for instance you can block applications as you see fit and control everything the device does with data.

In the lastest BES release you can change about 500 policies around security/sync/data/app management etc.

It's very slick and you should also get the operator to simply stop a device that reaches its limit.

[paddyhasneeds]

OK well from all the homework I've done the consensus seems to be that whilst our purchasing folks are looking at commercials of renewing any contract we should try and get some handsets on trial and I'll set a BESx and we'll see how it works - shouldn't be too hard as apparently mobile vendors are pretty much begging us for the business.

One question I have been asked and just can't find answered, is can you access other calendar's using Blackberry i.e. PA accessing the boss's and so on?

[Ordinary_Chap]

I don't think you can but I'm not a 100% certain on that.

As for building your server watch out for SQL on the same box unless the box is a decent spec. The admin console offers access through a browser and can be exceedingly slow if you ask an average spec'd box with everything running there.

Also make sure you install service pack 1 before doing anything if it's not in the standard build (It wasn't the last time I installed it). Before SP1 there were some major, major problems including DB corruption that would randomly occur and devices having very bizarre issues like SMS messages changing who they were from, from time to time!

Best of luck!
Lee

[paddyhasneeds]

Thanks, the plan is a single VM for BES with SQL Express but I'll most likely look at manually setting SQL RAM usage - there's a SAN/server refresh going on right now and once that's done CPU and RAM won't be an issue anyway.

The plan when would be to use the newest 5.02 as I believe stuff like SSO and the number of policies has increased from previous versions.

[paddyhasneeds]

Right, got six coming in next week on trial.

Other than RTFM is there any crucial "must know" info if I'm using Exchange 2003 and installing BES Express on its own dedicated VM?

[Ordinary_Chap]

paddyhasneeds said:

Right, got six coming in next week on trial.

Other than RTFM is there any crucial "must know" info if I'm using Exchange 2003 and installing BES Express on its own dedicated VM?

The only thing I have seen on the VM is box struggling because it couldn't handle the amount of I/O going on.

Other than that if you can run the SQL on another box that would be preferable but not essential.

In terms of connecting to Exchange 2003 it's all really quite straight forward if you get the BES AD account's permissions sorted. If anything isn't quite right you may see odd things on the devices like being unable to send email from the device etc.

The only thing that can take a little playing with is if you're going to push http traffic through the proxy, sometimes it takes a bit of effort to get the systems to join up but it's not big deal.

[paddyhasneeds]

Thanks, BES Express and SQL Express should be sufficient at our size. Be interesting to see the IO profile when it's in, but when we go to Exchange 2010 that should drop by an order of magnitude anyway.

[paddyhasneeds]

Right, got the Blackberry's and installed BES.

Surprisingly trouble free except I encountered this:

http://www.blackberry.com/btsc/search.do?cmd=displ...

Which isn't Blackberry's fault.

It's been a manic day so I may play with this thing tonight or I may just wait until tomorrow. One thing that is bugging me though, is that the BB shows 15 unread messages, but I've been logged into my PC via our VPN and have dealt with a ton of messages - so how come it shows 15 unread when in Outlook there aren't? I'd assumed it would sync itself up a little like IMAP?

Any hints/tips on the "Oh you must try this" stuff would be good as the folks from the vendor who lent us the kit are coming out tomorrow to see us so it would be good to be in a position of (some) knowledge on how the things work from a user perspective.

Oh, and I can see all my Outlook folders, so if I go into an obscure one how can I force it to download the last X or X days messages?

Thanks!

Edited by paddyhasneeds on Monday 22 November 19:03

[Ordinary_Chap]

paddyhasneeds said:

Right, got the Blackberry's and installed BES.

Surprisingly trouble free except I encountered this:

http://www.blackberry.com/btsc/search.do?cmd=displ...

Which isn't Blackberry's fault.

It's been a manic day so I may play with this thing tonight or I may just wait until tomorrow. One thing that is bugging me though, is that the BB shows 15 unread messages, but I've been logged into my PC via our VPN and have dealt with a ton of messages - so how come it shows 15 unread when in Outlook there aren't? I'd assumed it would sync itself up a little like IMAP?

Any hints/tips on the "Oh you must try this" stuff would be good as the folks from the vendor who lent us the kit are coming out tomorrow to see us so it would be good to be in a position of (some) knowledge on how the things work from a user perspective.

Oh, and I can see all my Outlook folders, so if I go into an obscure one how can I force it to download the last X or X days messages?

Thanks!

Edited by paddyhasneeds on Monday 22 November 19:03

Lol the sendas problem is the one I warned you about earlier.

Unfortunately the sync is a one way one so if you delete something out of outlook it wont be represented on the bb so you'll be left with those messages on your device and same goes for reading them in Outlook. Most simply read/delete them on their device and then it will sync the changes back to exchange.

In terms of try this, it's really all about using the device unless you want to do something like run the blackberry's through a proxy or use it to access shares etc. Most corp's run very few 3rd party apps on bb and just use them purely for messaging.

Blackberry Messenger is something to consider. Do you allow your users to use messaging services like MSN/OCS etc? Is not then you may want to disable it or log conversations if that is how you do it. Also I'd disable the WAP browser since most contracts charge for WAP usage and I know some services like youtube used to use it (not sure if thats still the case). It's worth just forcing all connections through the Blackberry browser imho and blocking all other browsers so you can be comfortable knowing it's going to be difficult for a user to do something with another of the browsers that can result in a chargable event.

[paddyhasneeds]

Christ on a bike I may be easily impressed but I'm impressed.

Looks like using the default policies all internet traffic is going through our BES as I got our block page, which surprised/shocked me hugely!

Also file shares are "just there", you type it in and it's accessible, and I can open documents One slight annoyance is that it prompts for credentials per shared folder/UNC path, though it does appear to remember them for that particular location, oh and our Intranet seems to ignore the "remember password" option in the browser, but I suspect that can be tuned and I'm trying to run before I've crawled.

I'm sure over the next 30 days I'll be back with some gripes but this is very impressive all things considered i.e. how little I've actually had to do as an Administrator.

[Ordinary_Chap]

RIM's platform is a country mile ahead of anything else out there but then it should be they've spent like 15 years perfecting it.

Just make sure your security policies do the simply like enforcing passwords/password time outs and enncryption and you'll have a secure platform! The only caveat to that is placing controls around app installs since more and more apps are seeking to share device information.

As for the intranet, it's most likely the blackberry browser that is at fault. It's pretty awful in all honesty but they have fixed it in OS6 and is now pretty respectable and scores very well in acid tests.

If you are running the intranet on IIS6/7 you can potentially host a bb version and change the authentication type to something the bb gets or host a true mobile version if you have the capability to do so. Although I'd personally just go for OS6 as it becomes available and that should solve the password issues and most other compatability issues.

In terms of OS6 if you do buy the devices, I'd advise you buy only devices that OS6 capable and not all are and some like the 9700 will run it but not the full version, hence it's replacement the 9780.

[paddyhasneeds]

Thanks. Tbh our Intranet is st, and I mean it's really st and should be condemned/replaced in the next six months or so with any luck, so I won't worry too much about that for the time being.

OS6, I'll ask about that tomorrow. The 9300 seems capable of running it, but I'm curious what you mean by "not the full version"? This says it's v5.0.0.832 (Platform 6.3.0.31).

I now have it running via my home wireless and I can open office documents, send meeting requests, all sorts.

Do you know if you can set it so when you're typing a password it briefly shows the last character you typed? I'm still learning the keyboard function keys and it's a bit of a faff wondering if you hit shift or alt or quite what exactly. I will RTFM at some point

Sorry if I sound like a small child, I know this is all kids play technically speaking but the way it all works so seamlessly on something so small is very impressive vs. "boot device, connect to internet, launch VPN client, login etc".

[Ordinary_Chap]

paddyhasneeds said:

Thanks. Tbh our Intranet is st, and I mean it's really st and should be condemned/replaced in the next six months or so with any luck, so I won't worry too much about that for the time being.

OS6, I'll ask about that tomorrow. The 9300 seems capable of running it, but I'm curious what you mean by "not the full version"? This says it's v5.0.0.832 (Platform 6.3.0.31).

I now have it running via my home wireless and I can open office documents, send meeting requests, all sorts.

Do you know if you can set it so when you're typing a password it briefly shows the last character you typed? I'm still learning the keyboard function keys and it's a bit of a faff wondering if you hit shift or alt or quite what exactly. I will RTFM at some point

Sorry if I sound like a small child, I know this is all kids play technically speaking but the way it all works so seamlessly on something so small is very impressive vs. "boot device, connect to internet, launch VPN client, login etc".

The people love Blackberry is, there is still no better of getting business functions done. They work are very reliable, robust and secure. In terms of RIM, they still have many features that are a killer for business like the BES and being able to direct connections through the proxy and the like. Try that with another platform!

As an administrator BES/BB's are a dream. Easy to configure, reliable and incredibly secure and ontop of that most users love them.

In terms of the 9300 or Kelper it's running version 5 of the OS. It's the number after the V that shows the OS not the platform number.

OS6 is availble on those devices as I understand it but because they have only half the memory of the new higher spec blackberry's they will run a cut down version of the new operating system. Now if the group coming to see you are a mobile company they maybe pushing a certain type of bb as I've seen them do plenty of times so its worth making up your own mind.

OS6 is the way all Blackberry's are going so I'd keep in mind the need for devices supporting the new OS.

It's also worth remembering the torch/storm are not designed for business even if they can do everything business wise.

I'm actually a Android fan but RIM are unbeatable in the corporate sector. Android are making some movement towards business with their Google Apps integration but the devices aren't secure and are often a pain to configure and aren't as reliable as BB's.

[paddyhasneeds]

What would you say are the downsides other than arguably "lack of choice"?

Personally I hate the Nokia's, they just aren't pleasant to use (ignoring management, I mean that as an end user) as I find them (and I'm not the only one) totally unintuitive.

iPhones and Android seem acceptable (I have a Wildfire and an iPod Touch) but again if you end up with more than a dozen, short of paying Good or someone you seem stuck with a bit of an admin headache - even if we went Blackberry I'm not sure we'd do away with ActiveSync completely as certain higher ups have their iPhone's though there's only a couple of those.

I'll have a better look at the BESx box tomorrow, I think I under specced the VM as I only gave it 1gb of RAM and it needed double that, so that was my last act before walking out the office this evening.

I'll see what this particular resellers view is on handsets tomorrow. I just asked them for half a dozen of "something suitable" as I'm not too involved in the commercial side of our contract renewal so there didn't seem much point trialling the most expensive handsets or the cheapest, so the intention was a bit of a "business staple" type of handset that we'd likely get bundled or at low cost.

[Ordinary_Chap]

As an admin if you want someting you can manage easily then it's bb without a doubt. Everything else is going to cause you a great deal more work unless you use a 3rd party platform which is more costs although it could still work out cheaper than BB contracts.

Activesync is a good bit of technology but security with Iphone's is a pretty serious problem. Lose or have one stolen with business sensitive docs and you could be in trouble.

Most consider BB's failings to be a lack of 3rd party apps. It took them two years to get 6,000 apps in the appworld. To put that in context Android adds about 10,000 per month.

The other failings are their devices don't compete with the high end devices like the Iphone 4, Nexus, Samsung Galaxy X etc or even the Windows Mobile HD2.

And up until OS6 the browser was awful as was the html rendering of emails etc.

But for the business purpose they were designed for they still spank the competition.