1. Allan Milo's Avatar
    Blend is a great program. Did they ever try bundling it with any Enterprise services?

    Posted via CB10
    02-08-17 10:56 AM
  2. Troy Tiscareno's Avatar
    Blend is a great program. Did they ever try bundling it with any Enterprise services?
    Enterprises typically don't allow Blend-type services - they block them at the network level for security reasons.
    02-08-17 11:42 AM
  3. itsyaboy's Avatar
    Enterprises typically don't allow Blend-type services - they block them at the network level for security reasons.
    Could you expand on that? I thought Blend was designed with enterprise security in mind. What are possible scenarios you thinking of?

    Posted via CB10
    02-08-17 12:26 PM
  4. elfuzz's Avatar
    Have you looked at airdroid?
    02-08-17 12:29 PM
  5. Dunt Dunt Dunt's Avatar
    Could you expand on that? I thought Blend was designed with enterprise security in mind. What are possible scenarios you thinking of?

    Posted via CB10
    Difference in BlackBerry thinking their software and services would work great on someone's enterprise network, and an IT department thinking the same thing. Installing software that is a resource hog and then opening ports on computers and networks... just wasn't something most IT departments wanted to do in 2014.
    02-08-17 01:16 PM
  6. Troy Tiscareno's Avatar
    Could you expand on that? I thought Blend was designed with enterprise security in mind. What are possible scenarios you thinking of?
    Generally, enterprise-class companies do everything they can to LIMIT the use of the network to business-critical applications. They view their job as "restrict EVERYTHING by default, and only allow things that have business justification." Unless important people at the company can convince IT that Blend was critical to productivity, they aren't going to get it on their enterprise networks. It's really that simple.

    I worked for a couple of big financial institutions in IT, and even for IT, apps and network access was severely locked down, and everything was logged. Of course, we also had SEC compliance issues, among others, to account for. At one company, I was one of 4 people (out of 18,000) to have Enterprise Admin access to the network, FWIW.
    Dunt Dunt Dunt likes this.
    02-08-17 04:46 PM
  7. itsyaboy's Avatar
    Generally, enterprise-class companies do everything they can to LIMIT the use of the network to business-critical applications. They view their job as "restrict EVERYTHING by default, and only allow things that have business justification." Unless important people at the company can convince IT that Blend was critical to productivity, they aren't going to get it on their enterprise networks. It's really that simple.

    I worked for a couple of big financial institutions in IT, and even for IT, apps and network access was severely locked down, and everything was logged. Of course, we also had SEC compliance issues, among others, to account for. At one company, I was one of 4 people (out of 18,000) to have Enterprise Admin access to the network, FWIW.
    Okay, thanks for this!

    Posted via CB10
    02-09-17 01:54 AM
  8. u4ria's Avatar
    Generally, enterprise-class companies do everything they can to LIMIT the use of the network to business-critical applications. They view their job as "restrict EVERYTHING by default, and only allow things that have business justification." Unless important people at the company can convince IT that Blend was critical to productivity, they aren't going to get it on their enterprise networks. It's really that simple.

    I worked for a couple of big financial institutions in IT, and even for IT, apps and network access was severely locked down, and everything was logged. Of course, we also had SEC compliance issues, among others, to account for. At one company, I was one of 4 people (out of 18,000) to have Enterprise Admin access to the network, FWIW.
    GENERALLY, as you stated. But companies allow users to have Google Hangouts, iMessages, Whatsapp and other desktop applications. Go figure.. I've worked in heavily regulated industries as well and typically "regular" employees wouldn't be able to install anything on their machines since they weren't local admins on their own machines. But others in IT were and could install anything they wanted basically.
    02-09-17 10:03 AM
  9. Kot Prada's Avatar
    Sorry, I'm confused. You'd rather dock your phone to a monitor with a BT keyboard and mouse over firing up Blend on your PC and accessing your stuff that way?
    BlackBerry Continuum?
    02-09-17 10:18 AM
  10. Dunt Dunt Dunt's Avatar
    GENERALLY, as you stated. But companies allow users to have Google Hangouts, iMessages, Whatsapp and other desktop applications. Go figure.. I've worked in heavily regulated industries as well and typically "regular" employees wouldn't be able to install anything on their machines since they weren't local admins on their own machines. But others in IT were and could install anything they wanted basically.
    The types of customers that BB10 was appealing to in 2014... were more the very regulated industries. Even now I expect the majority of "active" BB10 devices are enterprise devices. So the fact that Blend was EOL and that LINK is pretty much the same... leads me to believe that neither were important to those customers.

    Personally I love Blend for the ability to use my work PC for "messaging". But Outlook blows away the Email interface on Blend or the capabilities of BB10, and Cloud services took care of the need to access my files remotely. Again if Blend had been here ten years ago.... things might have been different, but it was too little too late as enterprise already had those needs covered too.
    02-09-17 10:24 AM
  11. joeldf's Avatar
    Have you looked at airdroid?
    The problem with Airdroid is that it runs through third-party servers. Blend basically creates a direct VPN connection between your PC and the phone.

    I haven't found any such android-based service that does it like that.

    Joel
    02-09-17 10:25 AM
  12. u4ria's Avatar
    The types of customers that BB10 was appealing to in 2014... were more the very regulated industries. Even now I expect the majority of "active" BB10 devices are enterprise devices. So the fact that Blend was EOL and that LINK is pretty much the same... leads me to believe that neither were important to those customers.

    Personally I love Blend for the ability to use my work PC for "messaging". But Outlook blows away the Email interface on Blend or the capabilities of BB10, and Cloud services took care of the need to access my files remotely. Again if Blend had been here ten years ago.... things might have been different, but it was too little too late as enterprise already had those needs covered too.
    And again they keep making the same mistakes over and over. They "assume" their customer or potential customers are enterprise only. Just like how they assumed enterprise customers don't want or care for cameras.

    Apple has no problem with iPhones in highly regulated enterprise environments yet they use iMessage. I see every single trader, executive, physician and even government officials using iPhones as their primary work supplied device.

    What's the excuse now for not having Blend available?
    02-09-17 10:50 AM
  13. Dunt Dunt Dunt's Avatar
    And again they keep making the same mistakes over and over. They "assume" their customer or potential customers are enterprise only. Just like how they assumed enterprise customers don't want or care for cameras.

    Apple has no problem with iPhones in highly regulated enterprise environments yet they use iMessage. I see every single trader, executive, physician and even government officials using iPhones as their primary work supplied device.

    What's the excuse now for not having Blend available?
    In general... people were asking for iPhones.

    In general... people didn't even know what Blend was or why they should want it, or how to make it work.

    Reason for not having Blend available... BB10 is dead, and the cost of recreating it for Android is probably just too high. And the desire of pairing a PC and a Mobile Device, just isn't that high anymore. As stated the number of people allowed to use BLEND at work was very limited, and the number of people that even use a PC at their home has greatly dropped off.
    02-09-17 11:07 AM
  14. Troy Tiscareno's Avatar
    And again they keep making the same mistakes over and over. They "assume" their customer or potential customers are enterprise only. Just like how they assumed enterprise customers don't want or care for cameras.

    Apple has no problem with iPhones in highly regulated enterprise environments yet they use iMessage. I see every single trader, executive, physician and even government officials using iPhones as their primary work supplied device.

    What's the excuse now for not having Blend available?
    Had BB built something like Blend back in 2005, when they were on top and everyone HAD to have a BB, and before cloud services were used by just about everyone, then it would have been adopted. But a decade later?

    Again, for Blend to work on a corporate network, ports have to be opened up and other restrictions lifted - which means formal requests with business justification have to be made, and weighed against the risks. For a lot of BB's big enterprise customers, the minor productivity gains (minor more in that only a relative few would get Blend access anyway) wouldn't be worth the risk, so it wouldn't be allowed on the network.

    Apple has never been afraid to roll things out to consumers, and things that live just on their own devices, like iMessage, they don't need to defend, because they implemented it well (end-to-end encryption for everyone, for free) and because it's all self-contained on their device, so nothing needs to happen on the corporate network. It's not as ideal (for the corporation) as BBM Enterprise, since the corporation has no record of those iMessage conversations, but the overall user demand for iPhone at all levels (mostly because of apps) meant that IT had to give in on that point. BB never had that level of demand again once the 2007 iPhone announcement happened - interest immediately started shifting to the iPhone and soon also to Android, because it was clear to almost everyone that a paradigm shift had taken place, and that all-touch, app-and-sensor-centric "do everything" phones were the new standard. BB was very, very late on making that shift.
    02-09-17 01:26 PM
  15. u4ria's Avatar
    We're referring to Blend in general and the original question was about Blend on Android. You guys keep talking about BlackBerry 10. That is where you're defending BlackBerry's short sightedness!

    The largest market holder is Android. With BlackBerry's entry in to Android and its concentration on software, this is something that they should be concentrating on. With the popularity of Airdroid, Kick, Google Hangouts, Whatsapp and the other countless apps, none have the capability like Blend. Why? Because none of them can connect to BBM, whereas Blend can. Blend pretty much can support whatever the Hub can. Being a software company, it wouldn't take much work for BlackBerry to support all those other applications since they're already on the users' phone.

    People don't just use these applications in the enterprise world. The majority of people are consumers. These same consumers are the ones that go to work and use devices there. If Apple can force IT departments to change, so can BlackBerry on Android. Change doesn't just happen over night. You have to give people an opportunity to actually use the software. With BlackBerry's concentration on Android, it's one of the applications that they should continue with. Especially since they've created the Hub, Password Keeper and countless other BlackBerry 10 apps. Remember, there are hundreds of other password management applications, calenders, etc.. out there. But that didn't stop BlackBerry from creating them as well for Android.
    02-09-17 03:53 PM
40 12

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