[ALToronto]

I just saw Omnitech post in another thread that service providers are going to start offering cloud based BES to individuals for a small monthly fee. What would be the benefit to individual or small business users (such as myself)? Other than added security, what would I gain for that small fee?

Posted via CB10

[BitPusher2600]

Personal BES has been catching my fancy for some time but it is complicated stuff to me. I was looking at BESX myself. I suppose paying T-Mobile for it might be neat, but who is controlling the server and how it interacts with your device?

Posted from BitPusher's Q10

[igor10000]

Very interesting to me, would like to learn more

Posted via CB10

[qwerty4ever]

Cloud-based BlackBerry Enterprise Service would simply allow you to activate your smartphone (or tablet presumably) using your own domain name or possibly a subdomain of the service provider; (e.g.) companyname.com or companyname.microsoftonline.com. I pay a small monthly fee for access to hosted Microsoft Exchange 2010 using my own domain name for email at present. The option to activate my BlackBerry 10 smartphone against a BES10 under my own domain name and gaining the option to separate personal and professional profiles would be nice. Microsoft, for instance, offers free email hosting (outlook.com) and monthly subscription email hosting (microsoftonline.com / microsooft office 365) so a similar model for hosted BES is viable. Remember BES10 is for device management whereas Microsoft Exchange 2010 handles email; this is quite different than BES4 and BES5.

[ALToronto]

I would definitely be interested. Hope they get moving on it soon - I had been considering Microsoft Exchange, but I'd much rather give my money to BlackBerry.

Posted via CB10

[SunshineStateFlyer]

I'm running a hosted exchange account on my BlackBerry which has been very convenient ever since. They also offer a BlackBerry service where you can connect your device to their BES. I have been using this option (for an additional fee) on my old OS7 device.

Now as BB10 supports ActiveSync there's not much of a point in still using the BES to me as a private user.

Posted via CB10

[DenverRalphy]

To an individual? Nothing really. That's about as useful as having a router in a house with only one computer.

Small businesses however, may benefit if the business owner wishes to monitor all traffic from company devices.

SwiftKeyed/Flowed via Tapatalk 4 Beta

[Omnitech]

MobileDeviceManagement

BlackBerry - Hosted BlackBerry Services with Cloud Mobility Software - US

BlackBerry quietly launches BES 10.1 in the cloud | ZDNet

Hosted BlackBerry Enterprise Server for Google Apps

BlackBerry Enterprise Server BES 10 Support

:: Cloud Capital Group ::

[dusdal]

Interesting for sure.

The value for small businesses is the obvious Avenue for this.


Van City Coffee ; WhitecapsFC ; PreMed Community ; Bristol Rovers Football Club

[ALToronto]

I run a small business with one permanent employee (besides myself) plus one or two work term students who change every 4 months. So far, we've all been using our own email accounts (mine is hosted by my website host).

I think there is a benefit even to a very small operation like mine. For one thing, I would have instant email sync, whereas right now I have to wait for Outlook to pull my webmail once every 30 minutes or so. I would also love to have business and personal profiles on my phone - this way I could keep my business and financial activities secure, and enjoy Android apps that request unreasonable permissions on my email- and contact-free personal side.

Am I off base here? Are there no-cost solutions that would give me the same features?

Posted via CB10

[Omnitech]

I run a small business with one permanent employee (besides myself) plus one or two work term students who change every 4 months. So far, we've all been using our own email accounts (mine is hosted by my website host).

I think there is a benefit even to a very small operation like mine. For one thing, I would have instant email sync, whereas right now I have to wait for Outlook to pull my webmail once every 30 minutes or so. I would also love to have business and personal profiles on my phone - this way I could keep my business and financial activities secure, and enjoy Android apps that request unreasonable permissions on my email- and contact-free personal side.

Am I off base here? Are there no-cost solutions that would give me the same features?

If you're a business owner, do yourself and your business a favor and spend a few dollars on a real service, not one of these Faustian Bargains where you are the product, and in exchange get so-called "free" service. There is no obligation on the part of such providers to perform to any standard whatsoever, it is simply "as-is, where-is".

Email hosting - typically Microsoft Exchange (or Exchange combined with BES in this case) can be obtained anywhere from about $6-$13/mo per user, and provides a plethora of very tangible benefits over "freebie" email services. One of the key ones being having your own company internet domain/address for email, but that's only the tip-tip-tip of the iceberg.

If you already have a company website, your web hosting company may already bundle some sort of email service in with your web hosting package, or have an optional add-on. (Though I tend to be rather picky about my email providers and recommend you research options before just taking whatever your hosting company gives you)


(Edit: looks like you are using your hosting provider's email service now, missed that in my first read)

[ALToronto]

I do use my website host's webmail, but it's only POP or IMAP (user's choice), not active sync. This means I would only get 90 days' email on my phone, which is not acceptable for a company with a sales cycle measured in months. So I have Outlook pull it, but as I mentioned before, it's at 30 minute intervals. Fortunately, my clients don't expect me to respond immediately.

I will definitely look into the BES services whose links you provided - I'm especially interested in the last one on the list.

Posted via CB10

[Omnitech]

I do use my website host's webmail, but it's only POP or IMAP (user's choice), not active sync. This means I would only get 90 days' email on my phone, which is not acceptable for a company with a sales cycle measured in months. So I have Outlook pull it, but as I mentioned before, it's at 30 minute intervals. Fortunately, my clients don't expect me to respond immediately.

I will definitely look into the BES services whose links you provided - I'm especially interested in the last one on the list.

If you're talking about desktop Outlook, of course you can increase the polling rate on that, and IMAP does support "push", assuming your host supports it. (The main pre-requisite is a sub-component called IMAP IDLE)

So you have no mobile email functionality at all right now?

It's good you're in Canada, there are more than the usual density of providers that have Blackberry-specific hosting plans there... not too surprisingly.

[ALToronto]

No, of course I have email on my Q10 - it's just that it can take up to 30 minutes for it to show up.

Posted via CB10

[Omnitech]

No, of course I have email on my Q10 - it's just that it can take up to 30 minutes for it to show up.

No excuse for that with a decent IMAP service, I get virtually instantaneous notifications of new messages using the IMAP providers I use. (Except for Yahoo, which uses a proprietary push system that Blackberry 10 and most other native smartphone email apps don't support)

[marknick]

Check your settings... we have exchange and run the normal routes now and email is pretty instant... I am on official 10.2 release and it has a push option for email... it hits my phone as fast as my laptop inbox

Posted via CB10

[Omnitech]

Check your settings... we have exchange and run the normal routes now and email is pretty instant... I am on official 10.2 release and it has a push option for email... it hits my phone as fast as my laptop inbox

He's using IMAP.

And while Microsoft Exchange servers do have an IMAP feature (if you decide to enable it), I assume you are not using that protocol because it is quite limited in functionality compared to the more standard Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), or RPC (desktop Outlook) protocols that most businesses would be configured by default to use in a typical MS Exchange environment.

[ALToronto]

Here's my problem with Outlook.com: my only alias on it is the same email address that my webmail uses. So email addressed to me first goes to webmail, hosted on the same server as my website (HostGator). Since my Outlook.com email address is the same, I cannot forward or otherwise push my email to Outlook; it pulls the email from the HostGator server at intervals that it finds convenient - in my case, 20-30 minutes. I've raised this issue with HostGator tech support, and they told me that they have other clients in the same boat as me, and it's Outlook's MO to do this.

I don't want to get another email address on Outlook since we can no longer enter whatever Reply-To address we want in our BB10 devices or PlayBooks. So I need to move the hosting of my webmail to another service, and I'm thinking that a personal BES will provide me with far more functionality than hosting on Outlook.com. I also don't like desktop email; I use 4 devices, and I need the same email on all of them.

[qwerty4ever]

Here's my problem with Outlook.com: my only alias on it is the same email address that my webmail uses. So email addressed to me first goes to webmail, hosted on the same server as my website (HostGator). Since my Outlook.com email address is the same, I cannot forward or otherwise push my email to Outlook; it pulls the email from the HostGator server at intervals that it finds convenient - in my case, 20-30 minutes. I've raised this issue with HostGator tech support, and they told me that they have other clients in the same boat as me, and it's Outlook's MO to do this.

I don't want to get another email address on Outlook since we can no longer enter whatever Reply-To address we want in our BB10 devices or PlayBooks. So I need to move the hosting of my webmail to another service, and I'm thinking that a personal BES will provide me with far more functionality than hosting on Outlook.com. I also don't like desktop email; I use 4 devices, and I need the same email on all of them.

Move your email to hosting.ca for secure hosted Microsoft Exchange and BlackBerry Enterprise Service for your BlackBerry 10 smartphone.

Posted via the BlackBerry Q5 using CB10.

[Omnitech]

Move your email to hosting.ca for secure hosted Microsoft Exchange and BlackBerry Enterprise Service for your BlackBerry 10 smartphone.

Yes, that was the fifth link I posted earlier in a list of cloud email providers and services.

[Omnitech]

Here's my problem with Outlook.com: my only alias on it is the same email address that my webmail uses. So email addressed to me first goes to webmail, hosted on the same server as my website (HostGator). Since my Outlook.com email address is the same, I cannot forward or otherwise push my email to Outlook...

"Outlook" can mean many things. Do you mean in this case "Outlook.com"?

...it pulls the email from the HostGator server at intervals that it finds convenient - in my case, 20-30 minutes. I've raised this issue with HostGator tech support, and they told me that they have other clients in the same boat as me, and it's Outlook's MO to do this.

It's actually a very convenient feature that the service allows you to grab email from an external system and import it into your common Outlook.com mailbox (Gmail has this feature too), but I view such features as something more useful for a temporary migration tool than a long-term platform for business email. The fact that they don't offer a more frequent polling-interval for "offsite" email systems doesn't surprise me, doing it much more often can consume excessive resources on both their side and the external provider's side.

I don't want to get another email address on Outlook since we can no longer enter whatever Reply-To address we want in our BB10 devices or PlayBooks. So I need to move the hosting of my webmail to another service, and I'm thinking that a personal BES will provide me with far more functionality than hosting on Outlook.com.

Outlook.com is a freebie "as-is/where-is" service. The commercial option from Microsoft would be Office365.

But I'm not much a fan of Microsoft online services in general, their bureacracy is labrynthine and tedious, among other things.

Do you need to keep your Outlook.com email address? If not, you have a plethora of options for email that can allow you to send/receive emails using your company's existing internet domain name.

But I'm curious - why did you get involved with Outlook.com in the first place, rather than simply connecting to your Hostgator email account directly?

[ESCON]

I do use my website host's webmail, but it's only POP or IMAP (user's choice), not active sync. This means I would only get 90 days' email on my phone, which is not acceptable for a company with a sales cycle measured in months. So I have Outlook pull it, but as I mentioned before, it's at 30 minute intervals. Fortunately, my clients don't expect me to respond immediately.

I will definitely look into the BES services whose links you provided - I'm especially interested in the last one on the list.

Posted via CB10

On Pop or IMAP you can have more than 90 days of emails...and on my Pop3 the Sync is every 5 minutes, IMAP is every 5 min without Push support by my Host and under 1 minute with Push support ! The last 5 years i use Pop3 On all my Mail accounts now i switch them step by step ...
My [email protected] email is on my phone under 5 seconds.

[ALToronto]

I don't have an @outlook.com email address. If I did, I wouldn't be posting here, I would simply forward my email to it and have it on my phone within seconds. But I can't run a business this way, so the only email address I have on Outlook.com is my company email address. And this is the reason for the email delay - Omnitech has just explained the details of the polling process.

I use only online Outlook.com, I don't use any desktop clients because 3 of my 4 email capable devices are mobile, and I need the same email on all of them.

I wasn't aware that you can now get more than 90 days of email with IMAP and POP on BB10.

In any event, the webmail service from HostGator is pretty pathetic - reminds me of Eudora back in the 1990's (yes, I'm that old). And even though Outlook.com has been pulling emails that are sent to me, it hasn't been pushing emails that I send, so my HostGator webmail is very incomplete. I'm pretty much stuck with Outlook.com, since everything is well organised. Is it any more bureaucratic than Google?

I had a very thorough look at the hosting.ca website, and I like their services the most. It sucks that my website and email will be on different hosts - I'm totally happy with HostGator for its website services, and it doesn't look like hosting.ca handles WordPress websites. I'll see how that works out, and I really appreciate everyone's advice here.

Posted via CB10

[Omnitech]

I don't have an @outlook.com email address. ...

In any event, the webmail service from HostGator is pretty pathetic - reminds me of Eudora back in the 1990's (yes, I'm that old).

Actually the newer versions of Eudora (ie "2000s" vintage) had features that many popular webmail services do not have today, just like many desktop email clients. A webmail client has a key advantage of accessibility from any web browser, but in terms of richness of overall functionality compared to a good desktop email client, there's no real comparison.

And even though Outlook.com has been pulling emails that are sent to me, it hasn't been pushing emails that I send, so my HostGator webmail is very incomplete. I'm pretty much stuck with Outlook.com, since everything is well organised. Is it any more bureaucratic than Google?

I personally wouldn't use either to run a business.

So basically you are using Outlook.com as a webmail client for your Hostgator email, right?

So yeah, that creates a problem with outgoing messages, among other things.

If it's also connecting via POP3, then another problem is it has likely removed messages from your hostgator account and if you want to change providers you would have to pull all the messages off of Outlook.com (There are some automated tools that can do that, and preserve folder structure)

I had a very thorough look at the hosting.ca website, and I like their services the most. It sucks that my website and email will be on different hosts...

That's really not a big deal, the thing you're doing w/ Outlook.com is actually way worse than that.