[AbidingSeraph]

Around the time that Blackberry Balance was released, the Enterprise for whom I work began to receive more and more requests from users for "free" applications from the app store. As we began to look closer at the implications of allowing app store access on corporately provided devices, our internal Legal department threw up a giant red flag and have taken the following position.

"Apps in the app store that are free to the consumer are not necessarily free to the enterprise, and therefore a license agreement must be reached with each respective application vendor before they may be made available for download on corporate devices"

I am curious to hear from other admins on the positions that your companies are taking with regard to this matter. Has anyone implemented balance for corporate devices?

[knottyrope]

"Apps in the app store that are free to the consumer are not necessarily free to the enterprise, and therefore a license agreement must be reached with each respective application vendor before they may be made available for download on corporate devices"


I have not seen that in app world, do you have some examples?

I let users run what they want with out balance but will be moving to it soon.
but this is us and not everyones choice. I know some that lock devices down so much they cant do much besides email and phone on it.

[AbidingSeraph]

According to our legal department, they are saying that "most of the apps" specify in the terms of use "not for commercial use". Therefore if these apps are being used in the course of performing ones job, then the owner is in violation of the terms of use. I don't have a specific example, however I believed they looked at Bloomberg Mobile.

[knottyrope]

but if using balance, work can be separated from bussiness and you can let users have what ever aps they want.

You can even lock it down so nothing can be trasfered between work and play.

Or are you a finacial company? if yes then they should not be following bussiness stocks on it

[AbidingSeraph]

We are indeed a financial company. Moreover,they told me that it doesn't really matter if I partition part of the device off for "personal use", rather its a question of liability of ownership. Apparently if the company is liable for the service and the hardware then they become liable for activity performed on the device. That is why I am curious how other corporations have approached this issue.

[knottyrope]

if it is a BYOD, then you are not liable.

If you supply the devie then you have to comply.

[AbidingSeraph]

Yes, the issue in question for me is for Corporately provided devices. I am not concerned with BYOD. Is your organization BYOD only?

[knottyrope]

BYO ithing and we supply BlackBerry devices.

[MarkF]

I had this conversation with our RIM account managers and they were astounded that anyone would be worried about downloading free apps on a corporate owned device.

This is a real headache for us, we are having to run reports on the SQL DB to list the installed apps on each user's BB. We are also explicitly forbidden to collect said data on any BYOD BB. I'm thinking we assign each BYOD BB to a certain group and filter that out of the SQL query. What a mess.

[AbidingSeraph]

Originally Posted by MarkF

I had this conversation with our RIM account managers and they were astounded that anyone would be worried about downloading free apps on a corporate owned device.

This is a real headache for us, we are having to run reports on the SQL DB to list the installed apps on each user's BB. We are also explicitly forbidden to collect said data on any BYOD BB. I'm thinking we assign each BYOD BB to a certain group and filter that out of the SQL query. What a mess.

Yes, I have gotten the same response from our RIM contacts as well. They keep acting like its no big deal, however all of the Legal documentation I have read specifies that "If necessary, BlackBerry smartphone users must also sign an agreement or content provider Terms and Conditions"

[freakinvibe]

We only allow a limited set of apps from AppWorld at the moment (4 to be precise), and they are for business use. Besides the legal concerns there is also the roaming data charges that can get very high for apps that constantly load data in the background.

Our experience with balance was not so good. For example, when we switched on Balance, many addresses in e-mails got yellow exclamation marks which completely confused users. It turned out that Balance will mark all addresses that are not in the corporate address book with and exclamation mark.