Recurring Problems Using Beamberry
I've purchased 3 Beamberry licenses for use on some Blackberry Curves. My intent is to do a trial run for a few weeks and eventually roll out 75-100 licenses to drivers out in the field. I tried a trial license for a week and all seemed well. I then decided to get 3 licenses to get a small number of users trained on it and extend the pilot process. Within a few days, We ran into a problem on all 3 Blackberries. Starting last week on Monday the 17th, only the first page of multi-page PDF attachments would print. For example, where it normally would say "Printing page 1 of 3", it would say "Printing page 1 of 0" instead and then only the first page would print. If we choose to view the attachment, all of the pages are displayed. Printing each page individually from the View option does allow us to print each page but, of course, this is a hassle for our drivers. We could potentially have 5-15 page PDF attachments and we like the ability of printing all pages with only a few clicks of the trackball.
As I said, all of a sudden, all of the Blackberries started showing this problem. Then on the morning of the 19th, it started working again. I thought (or hoped!) it was a one time fluke but the same thing started happening again this past Saturday moorning the 22nd.
Just as an FYI, I did contact Beamberry support when this first happened in order to request an explanation of some sort. They asked me to take out the batteries on the Blackberries and they said that they will check their systems for any potential problems. Taking out the batteries did not help and I did not hear back from them. I do know that the Beamberry client software contacts their servers to do some sort of conversion process on-the-fly in order to view or print attachments. I tested different combination of Blackberries, printers, and printer bluetooth dongles and got the same result every time. It seems clear at this point that something is failing on their end. I have contacted them again but have not yet heard back.
I'd like to know if anybody else has experienced this problem. Is there a potential workaround of some sort? Is the product simply not reliable enough to be used for a mission-critical production task? Is another product known to be more reliable? Beamberry has responded once to my emails. I think that they can be more responsive and upfront about any issues they experience. They should also provide feedback to their customers via emails to their registered users or via a support forum on their web site. We are about to invest (or were going to?) thousands of dollars in software licenses alone but I am not willing to proceed until I know precisely where this issue stands. I'm more than willing to look at other products or pay a skilled Java developer to write a similar software solution. I'm sure it's not that difficult.
Thanks for any feedback,
Jack