I attended this event today and found it interesting. This was a small local event, but I was surprised and happy that they filled the room for this. Within the next couple of days, they will post the powerpoint used for the presentation, but for now, here's my take on the event based on what I can remember since I can't type too quickly on my Playbook.
Overview
The following items were touched upon during the overview:
- NFC for keycard for building access
- Pairing via tapping
- More augmented reality integration
- Docs to go - enhanced editing
- Device rendere PDF itself instead of via BES
- Universal search coming to playbook.
- Blackberry device tradeup program - $100.00 gift card for your old device if you trade up. Details at http://blackberry.com/tradeup
Playbook Roadmap
This was an hour-long presentation with only a brief mention at the end about the gaming platform. It was tailored more toward the enterprise IT audience. They spoke about the UI, PIM, Playbook as laptop replacement, the Android player, Blackberry Balance, and enterprise app deployment.
Most of the presentation was Powerpoint slides of screenshots (mockups?), but they did demo the UI and they had a somewhat working version of the PIM. Most people here are aware of the UI changes since they're all in the 2.0 beta that's out now. The paradigm is basically that you can arrange your apps in either folders or panels. Unlike the 1.x paradigm which keeps the original app icons in the 'All' panel and copies in panels you drag icons to, 2.0 simply moves the icons. So there is apparently only one icon per app - either in the main panel, in a folder, in an alternate panel, or in a folder within the alternate panel. This is convenient and flexible, but it's screaming out for universal search.
Also, the way you create folders is to drag one app on top of another so that they are grouped in a folder. The downside here is that I don't think you can create a folder with only a single app. For example, if you only have a single RSS app, you can't create a 'News' folder that contains only that app later being able to add additional 'News' apps to the folder. There also appears to be 'special' folders that are automatically created by the OS. The Bridge folder would be an example of this.
I have to admit that the PIM looked pretty cool. The email app looks similar to the one in the Bridge, but you can pinch/zoom which I had been hoping for. Contacts looks similar as well. There is a nice addition to the calendar which allows you to use a Schedule, Agenda, or People view of events. So far so good, but they still have some work to do.
Finally, I asked and there is no way to turn notifications on and off. This would be nice so that you don't interrupted during a presentation on your Playbook to a customer by an email notification from a competitor (which could be embarrassing).
Balance
An Enterprise app world will allow the deployment of enterprise specific apps to the Playbook independent of App World. There will be app configurations where you can specify that apps are required, optional, or not allowed in the work context. Additionally, in App World, there will be a new tab called "Work" which will be the apps that you have within your work context.
BES express requires 5.0.3. It will strips out policies and makes it a enterprise device. You can set up Balance to require a login to enter the enterprise work mode. The work and personal side are basically fenced off but you will be able to administer policies to allow/disallow certain functionality across the fence. Balance will support block copy and paste. By default you can move from 'your' side to the 'work' side, but not back. On phones, Balance requires 6.0 or higher. Because of this, they've implemented the $100.00 Tradeup program for incentive to upgrade.
Playbook as Laptop Replacement
The majority of this part of the presentation was the Citrix app. This app is optimized for performance which makes it a lot quicker and slicker than just a web-based Citrix client. It runs faster because it doesn't have to do complete http refreshes for every change. Social network app proxy will strip out unnecessary data improving performance. They made a pont to say that Citrix is reading the app world reviews and are modifying/enhancing based on them.
Sharepoint management is supported including check in/ check out for documents and Shared calendar. You can copy to your own calendar. Shared lists are also supported. Pricing will be based on a client-based license model.
Enterprise instant messenger will support MS Lync server OCS (office communicator server), Lotus Sametime, and Novel Groupwise Messenger. It integrates with email, contact, spell check, file transfer, and public/private groups.
Mobile Voice will provide voice over wifi. It will duplicate desktop phone capability (sounds similar to the Google Voice model only more secure). When you make a call, it sends a data packet to your PBX which calls you back so its treated as an incoming phone call.
They also spoke about simple custom apps that can be quickly and inexpensively created via WebWorks. The samples they spoke about can be found at
Enterprise - Small applications that can have majo... - BlackBerry Support Community Forums. The samples include a Free 411 app and a "My Portal" app.
They also talked about Blackberry Mobile Conferencing, Bb Travel (which can parse an email and populate a calendar), and the Files app which maps to network share.
Enterprise Tools
The BlackBerry Resource Kit was created from scripts that Blackberry used to perform maintenance and decided to spruce up and release for BES admins. Among the tools are Directory sync, Domain Search, Application reporting tools, Message receipt confirmation tools, Log monitoring tools, and Log analysis tools.
Mobile Strategy
Realizing that enterprises might want to allow employees to use their own devices, RIM is leveraging a recent acquisition (Ubitexx) to have a device management console that allows a single interface to manage a multi-device platform. This conforms to the BES architectural model and hooks into OS specific APIs to allow policy management among different platforms within the same enterprise infrastructure. iOS provides the most APIs to allow control of the devices. Android has far fewer. Microsoft has too many locked APIs at this point to allow this console to manage Windows Phone.
Conclusion
There has been a lot going on behind the scenes at RIM (especially recently). They seem to have a pretty clear vision of where they are heading, but are having to support 2 device platforms along the way (for now). I found this presentation to be more comforting in terms of vision for RIM than I did after hearing the DevCon keynote. There seems to be an appropriate blend of enhancing/retooling existing successful technology with implementing that technology and extending within the new QNX architecture. As a side note, only once during the entire presentation was the acronym BBX used. It was still being referred to as QNX.
Unlike DevCon, there was only one freebie Playbook that was given away via a raffle. They did, however, give out nice little business card holders. I was surprised when I opened the box. I was expecting a very conservative all-business-looking black card holder. Much to my surprise, when I opened the box, I immediately noticed that the card holders were Crackberry Orange (see thumbnail)!
I'm sure I missed a bunch, but just thought I'd pass the info along.