[CometGSR]

Hello everyone!

I work at a Law Firm with about 125 lawyers and another 90 or so support staff and we have successfully purchased BES 10 (soon be 12) very soon. I must admit, I have not seen a company roll out the red carpet for us like the company did for us.

We are a long time BES user, so long that our old SRP has one digit less than normally seen. At our peak, we had 70 Blackberrys at the Firm and they had a pretty good run. We are now down to 2 legacy devices and are in the process of sending our BES5 system packing. During that time I had 70 devices at it's peak, we had many users that utilized Desktop Manager to do Public Folder syncs. We had all sorts of problems with this everyday with people duplicating contacts and calendar entries, syncs quitting for unknown reasons and the let down telling people they needed to pay $25-$30 more a month for BES provisioning. I pretty much lost my patience with the whole platform and became very negative toward BB because it caused me so much work. It was much easier to have the users hang off of ActiveSync and never touch the device again and tell people that "Public Folders are not supported in ActiveSync".

I got a cold call from the sales team at BB and he let me complain about my experience for a half hour. After I said my piece, he told me to give them a chance. I said sure but with some restrictions.. I told him if I put up a server for him, update it and have it ready, BB is responsible for helping me implement the software. They are the experts of their software, so let them do it. He shocked me when he said "We can do that". I batted for BB with management and we got got approval for a pilot and went to work..

The software install, certificates and setup went very smooth, even with me at the controls. They pretty much told me where to click and we did it. It took two hours or so, but I had a working SRP with Gold and Silver CALs when I was done. We used EZ Pass, which allowed us to receive Silver CALs for free. Gold CALs had a shelf life on them, which they were nice enough to renew for us later as we were still getting the hang of the BES and Work Space.

iPhone installs went like butter! I was able to put Work Space on a dozen devices and they all seemed to work fairly well. In our experience, they especially worked well on iPhone 5 devices. iPhone 4 was a little too pokey but was usable. Notifications worked good after the "learning period" and the users had a good experience with Work Space. It is interesting that we can publish apps, which might come in handy in the future as we look into apps such as digital dictation and time entry applications, both of which would utilize the VPN that BES Work Space offers.

Android devices worked good too but there is so much inconsistency among the devices that it is harder to implement. A user in the pilot had a Motorola Droid Maxx, which was on the list of unsupported devices due to the processor type. That user would have to use a Silver CAL with Touchdown. BB needs to work with the hardware vendors to find a way around this because an inconsistent install is a big deal to someone like myself who has to keep track of who has what. Since BB works best with Touchdown, they should work closely with Symantec to make getting licensing easier. I have been working with Symantec to get a corporate license for Touchdown but they are having trouble coming up with a SKU for it.

Our Firm did not go with Gold CALs and Work Space at this time because of funding, so we are going forward with Silver CALs for all users. I would imagine that we would switch to Gold at some point. For now, we are able to create policies to insist on passwords for devices and do some fairly decent managing of their device. I might also work with the Android users to switch them to either Blackberry or iPhone to make management easier.

No doom and gloom here.. The moral to this story is, if you provide a little extra help, it goes a long way to repairing relationships and creating business for themselves. We looked hard at MaaS360 but BB did their thing to make us look at them again. Yeah it took some work on their part, but look at the result. I hope Blackberry continues this kind of service because it DOES help and it DOES bring in business.

Give the guys a shot and let them earn your business. If someone has questions regarding their EZ Pass program or BB assisted install, send me a PM.

[world traveler and former ceo]

i think under CEO CHEN, Blackberry is back to where it needs to be .. innovative, supportive and best in class �

next move there at this Law Firm is to get them on the CLASSIC or PASSPORT!

[CometGSR]

It won't take long for one to show up, either I buy one myself or the lawyers buy them for themselves. One of those legacy devices are in upper management, we will see if he likes his Q10 device enough to show it to others.

[highos]

Are you only using UDS? As in only iOS/Android at the moment with no BlackBerry devices? We're the almost completely opposite then-I'm coming from an almost pure BB10 - BDS configuration where we are using UDS to manage some iPhone's (token devices for VIP's) and iPad's (much larger) it's interesting to hear the reversal of the situation we're in!

If you haven't used BlackBerry 10 with BlackBerry Balance (Silver CAL) it's a fantastic experience from a corporate accessibility standpoint... completely seamless having access to both personal accounts and work accounts and data and it being able to be segregated-not just visually but also from a security standpoint and having the Work Perimeter with the Work Browser to access internal website (say SharePoint?) or Work Drives for SMB shares and SharePoint libraries have been real key benefits for us compared to the legacy platform.

Great to hear another positive story out there!

[CometGSR]

Yes, we are mainly a UDS shop, with mostly iPhone devices of different vintages. We only have 4 Blackberry 10 devices and about 15 Android devices. We did not encourage iPhone, that is just want people at the Firm wanted to purchase. In the future, I will be seeing if I can convince the Androids to pick either iPhone or Blackberry.

I am using a Q10 with Blackberry Balance on my personal device. It took awhile to get used to it at first but I have grown to like it. I like how it makes the work stuff disappear off of my Hub until I unlock the Work Space. It seems that BB devices give you the best of the BES for the least amount of money because of the access to the internal websites and work drives. I am not sure what use that functionality will be yet but it gives us options. I know for UDS, Gold did an amazing job accessing internal data through that VPN tunnel.

BB has something here, I hope that other I.T. Admins and Engineers give BB a chance. I was able to give us a real mobile device management platform for the price of two Dell laptops. Even if you had to pay for Silver Cals after the EZ pass is over, it is still a good deal.