Any experience supporting Blackberry Connect devices?
 

I'm curious to know if anyone here has added any Blackberry Connect phones to their BES and what their experiences were supporting those devices... anything new? problems? blackberry connect specific issues, etc?

I'm hearing mumurs that there may be a push to replace some devices here with small more regular phone sized devices, and our current data provider T-Mobile on seems to offer Blackberry Connect on the Samsung T719.

So I just wanted to find out of there are any additional things I could be concerned with... do Blackberry connect devices only work on a certain BES version, etc...

Thanks for any input.

If you are used the the ease of setting up and supporting BB's then the BB connect will be a bit of a shock

Im running BBconnect for Treo 650 and its at least 10x as complicated to install and support and it gets you about 1/3 the features of a BB

The lookups DONT include phone numbers, the lookups take about 4 clicks as opposed to one on a BB. There is no wireless address book sync. Its JUST email and calendar

heaven forbid you decide to remove BB connect from the device or simply want to reactivate the device. Getting the BB connect software to find of generate a PIN after the first install is a nightmare. You basically need to hard reset the Palm and sync it with a NEW username to get the BB connect to install and sync everything ... Then move the apps and stuff from the old user over manually by copying the palm files

We are runing BES 4.1.x and Domino - but I doubt that has any bearing on my issues

Doug

Thanks Doug I'm looking for reason to put in that no I don't think it's a good idea to bring BC devices in to the org... the lack of address book syncing might be a big piece of ammunition for me, these people live and breath by their personal address books.

I have a few units of the nokia e-61...you can sync the personal address books locally if using notes with server copy replication. Using BC, you miss out on a lot of the pros with wireless activity of contacts, memos, etc.

have you seen my FAQ's?
BlackBerry Connect - BlackBerryFAQ

One issue that does re-occur and is a complete PITA is that when the device os gets upgraded you might need an updated version of the BB connect sw for it to work. As certain device manufaturers (e.g. SonyEricsson) provide the users with 'upgrade software' as standard (similar to windows updates) then it's possible for end-users to easily break a working solution.

To my mind connect is fine for single/couple of users but try deploying 50 devices and you'll just have headaches...

bb

Thanks for the link to the FAQ, I'll check it out.

Im using BB connect for my treo because I enjoy the irony of a BES admin not having a BB and I like the touch screen and the DB that I use is not avial for BB

I spent 4 hours trying to get BB connect working on a replacement Palm. No matter what I did it woudnt get a PIN

As it turns out once BB connect is associated with a username in Palm desktop it simply wouldn't go through all the needed steps. To fix it I needed to sync the new palm as a new user get the BB connect working then manually hack over all the old palm data and apps ...
Think about how long it woudl take to fix that issue for an end user

Thanks for the info everybody, good food for thought here.