Joris_FRST

Anyone running it at work ?

I need to find out what it can do and what it will cost by 17th of may and next week i'm out of the office for 3 days, lol.


Quick questions,

How exactly does it work, is the push done by provider or by IP ?

If it is done by provider from the BES, can I choose different providers for different devices, so a swedish user with a swedish number can use his local gprs and don't pay roaming costs. Same for france, belgium etc...
Would need reasticly 9 countries and different providers set up.

If the push is done by IP it looks quite obvious you only need a open GPRS connection all the time ?

I know nowt about it, lol

Jim Galbally

think of blackberry as a little mini-internet

the service providers (ie vodaphone, o2, orange etc.) have their own connections into this network.

your blackberry device will connect to the blackberry mini-internet via a local accesspoint provided by your service provider. this should be either free or very low cost depending on your data package. you will have an always on connection to this network.

your blackbeery will talk to the main blackberry mail servers to send/receive email (it's push email, so itll go straight to the handheld)

your BES will be connected to the internet, and havea connection open to the blackberry mail servers. this is how is passes information between your exhange (or notes) server and the device (ie youre using a 3rd party)

its just a very over-complicated internet mail system really.

and PUSH email, isnt really push, since the device is always talking to the blackberry servers, its not like it magically establishes a connection that wasnt there before

Davie

I@ve installed this into a massive enterprise mate.

Like what has been said, it's basically mobile e-mail / internet that connects to your choice of network. Mine is vodafone.

You can configure it for enterprise systems such as exchange / lotus etc, but it will also work with ISP e-mail addresses, such as POP3.

We also have a utility that allows us to control selected servers on our network. Nothing like re-bboting a SQL cluster from Prague

Any questions at all mate i'll answer them. The have a great knowledbase on their site too.

Cheers,

David

Jim Galbally

by the way, id personally go for activesync type setup. (activesync is a native microsoft protocol)

it's standard in exchange 2003 and standard on Windows Mobile devices (ie PDAs)

as long as your handheld can talk to your exchange server, it'll do everything the BES does, and more, and at a fraction of the cost.

i personally use a nokia 9300 with RoadSync (activesync client for S80) and apart from the 80quid licence for roadsync (which you wouldnt need ona native WM device) it's completely free.

i only pay for data costs which in my case is ZERO as im on an uhlimited data contract (which is the same on our BB contract tho)


having tried both the blackberry stuff, and the native activesync stuff, i FAR prefer activesync.

its cheaper, less to go wrong, and it doesnt rely on any 3rd parties

Joris_FRST

That's my question really, 30 people will be on the proximus network in belgium,

30 on vodafone in UK

40 on some or other in germany (not decided yet)

and so on.

And we want to do this from one central server, is this possible ?

Thanks for your help

Jim Galbally

yes, all possible, wont need any special setups

AndyP

Very interesting fella's, it's interesting to hear things described in simple terms. Ive never been that serious about IT but realise that I need to learn more

Davie

yes all possible like has been said.

You will probably get different SID's from the different networks. Not sure how the routing will work though, but providing the BES can access the networks, you should be OK.

That'll be Ł200 please. Available for rolling contracts

Joris_FRST

thank you very much

well, the business asked for it, now we're trying to get a price for it, but is a bit short notice really, so all help appreciated

I'll probably invest a lot of my time in it, get a price for a setup we like and then they'll tell me : "oh, that expensive, well maybe not then"

Jim Galbally

costings?

well we pay about 170 per device plus whatever the tarrif is, probably about 20 a month

for the server just get a cheap 1U blade jobby, wont cost much, say 1-2k? (DONT run it off the exchange server!)

BES software is about 3k and that'll get your 1st 20 user licences (theyre $99 per CAL)



or, for my activesync idea...

however much the devices are (decent PDAs are about 200 on contract, more like 100quid to a corporate one)

then you'll need... erm... NOTHING as long as your exchange server is 2003 SP2 and can see the internet

much cheaper


whats your existing internet setup? and do you have any current GPRS users on a corporate VPN (ie we have our own GPRS APN on Orange, goes straight into our network)

Joris_FRST

can't use activsync i think as we have a Lotus Domino mail environment.

We don't have any mobile access for the moment, (bar our own cisco vpn solution)

Some users are GPRS enabled, but just to internet.

So for the moment we have nothing.

I just want to understand how your BES acutally speaks to the devices, is it directly to a network and how many different networks can you have devices on.

Is it just the case of having a blackberry or blackberry client on GPRS, and that talks to blackberry servers over internet and they communicate back to your server ? Or is it really provider dependant ?

Davie

It has to use a GPRS carrier on whatever network. Otherwose the device can operate like a mobile on GSM.

And lotus is the work of the devil!!!!!! Immediately propose an exchange environment.

Jim Galbally

i need to draw a diagram to exmplain it really.

your device connects to the blackberry.net GPRS APN (which goes via the provider, but still conencts directly to BLACKBERRY's network) ie the data travels through a tunnel to blackberry doesnt really touch the prover directly

your BES server connects to the blackberry.net main mail server via the internet (again, kinda transparently touching the internet ISP)

also if you're on lotus notes then yes you'll need blackberry coz activesync is exchange only

ps notes is shit

also there's a new thing called blackberry connect, which is blackberry client software for your PDA/smartphone.

you can get blackberry on your XDA2 or Nokia 9300 of palmOS PDA etc. etc. it doesnt support as many features as a "proper" blackberry handheld tho (but proper blackberrys are shit imho )

Joris_FRST

That's the thing that i was wondering if there was a blackberry managed backbone, so provider don't matter then

Cool, so should be piss easy to set up for different providers, as long as the blackberry devices are locally connected.

That was the question really.

Lotus Domino is cool

Just working on a big project migrating everything to notes 7 over here to one new domain for US / Europe. Loads of work and the US guys changing idea's every 5 mins, we should be piloting now, but they found something interesting they maybe could change again

Jim Galbally

yep that was the point i was trying to make, im just bad at explaining things

Davie

LOL! i know exactly what you mean. I'm sitting here with little diagrams and it makes perfect sense until i try and type it.!

Joris_FRST

to be honest the diagram on the blackberry site is crap

it says internet => wireless network.

If they only said what the "=>" was i wouldn't have had all these questions


Thanks guys

Speaking to vendors next thursday, so i can hold my foot down and don't let them try to sell me a server for every region