Reasons to upgrade to BES 5

[thor2923]

I am a BES admin and have always enjoyed working with BES and blackberries in general. We are running BES 4.1.7 and I would like to upgrade to 5. The trouble is BES 4 runs fine for what we are doing, but I would like a chance to work with BES 5 to stay up with the technology and update my certs. Our IT director will be visiting our office in a couple weeks and would like to be able to present a strong case for upgrading, other then I think it would be cool and my cert will be retired in a few months. Does anyone have any suggestions or strong selling points I could use?

[dpeters11]

Do you have TSupport or something similar? The first thing is if BES 5 will cost money

The single biggest things that an IT director might be interested in is roles, where a Help Desk type can do certain things, but don't have access to all the functions. Also, High Availability. You can have multiple BES servers (one license) and fail over during patches, emergency downtime etc. The secondary BES handles everything seamlessly to the users. It only needs one SRP since they don't connect at the same time.

Biggest user changes (if they have OS5 on the device), better Outlook folder management, flags sync.

Of course the biggest change overall is BAS, the web based admin. Honestly, I think I miss the old console.

Also, if you do have TSupport, keep in mind the product lifecycle. 4.1.7 is end of support July 2, 2011, which for TSupport customers is defined as:
"Customer with existing contract continues to be supported; all issues are triaged but if the issue reported has been resolved in a current version, customer may be instructed to update the software. Customer may continue to receive hot fixes for Sev 1 and security issues."

I'd probably wait until 5.0 SP2 though.

[GlenB]

You could always find a spare machine and download the free BES Express to get a heads up on some of the new features, configuring a few test devices to work with it.