BES/Blackberry employment

[titanjhb]

Firstly, sorry if I'm in the wrong forum, couldn't really decide where this question fits.

So here goes, in your job, are you fully dedicated to managing or maintaining part of the Blackberry solution (not just BES)?

Reason I'm asking is I'm trying to determine what the actual job market within the blackberry ecosystem looks like across the world.

I live in South Africa, I'm a total Blackberry NUT! But I'm a Microsoft SCCM administrator as day job. I have tried countless times to move my career to the Blackberry direction, and at this stage I'm starting to wonder if that is a realistic dream. Closest I've come was interviewing at RIM for a sales job (I'm a techy!). The local "mobile solutions" providers all tell me they can have me work on BES partially, but mostly I will have to be an exchange admin.

What should I do???

[Tiassa]

The "mobile solutions providers" are correct. In most organizations the BB admins also run the e-mail system as there is some synergy there, and there are few organizations that are big enough to need to dedicate a person just to BES administration.

[titanjhb]

Im starting to get that feeling ye. I fully understand the synergy, I was hoping that there was more instances where admin were BB only, it does seem like for most its an auxiliary function, I would like it as my primary function.

[eBoyDog]

I can't account for other companies how with mine, I am the email admin and roughly I spend 75% of my time with issues maintaining the email system with the rest of the 25% devoted to mobile device email. Thanks to BES 95% of that mobile device support is for Blackberrys and the rest, all the other mobile device such as iPhone and Android device.

Unless you working for huge multi-national or large corporation, there are few Blackberry only jobs out there. With BES, administration is so good that it's not a major task for 1 admin to handle thousands of BB devices with major spare time on their hands.

The typical BES admin handle not just Blackberrys but other mobile devices using other email gateway servers.

[swathe]

A totally dedicated BES job would be awesome, but usually BES is part of somebodies system administration role.

[crackhead007]

I actually started as an Active Directory and exchange admin and was given the role of Blackberry administrator at my new company. The last company I worked for had a BES admin who only did BES work. He did have over 3000 blackberries and he did procurement as well. I have responsibility for about 6000 mailboxes and just under 850 blackberries. While it is rare to see someone in charge of solely blackberries it does happen.

We should start a BBM group for BES admins.

[kens24kg]

I work for a company that has close to 100,000 users wold wide. Iused to do email support, with lotus notes as the email solution. I startedt omigrate into providing BB support as it goes hand in hand, as notes is what they want inthe corp environment on their device. Afte a year or so the comany decided that they needed tomake the Mobility support a separate function of the company and i made the transistion to do the Blackberry admin work full time. It definately is a bonus to be able to understand and know how the email system works and functions at our company, as the devices depend on making sure email can make it to the device.

It is great to be able to support only Blackberry users full time. In order to do this you wouldneed to likely get in with a company and then possibly move up to supporting the Blackberry solution. You woudl need to research a company that actually uses Blackberry as a product, so that they are running Enterprise Servers and the such so that the jobs will be there.