Quote:
Originally Posted by moneyandmoremoney
Will my carrier charge me for the data received/sent in regards to the emails sent and received?
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Excellent question -- and my guess is that your carrier will still be charging you for data, as it it their network over which you must communicate with any back-end BES.
That's part of my concern as well. I've been a BES and BIS user, and currently have BIS via T-Mobile. If I were to sign on for this, I'd have the benefit of the extra features that BES offers (e.g., syncing calendar, phone book and tasks, OWA), but I can't imagine having this work unless I still pay T-Mobile for a BIS/Internet data plan.
I'm currently using Google Sync and Google Calendar (via Google Docs) to sync my Outlook calendar (on two workstations and a laptop) to my Blackberry, and it seems to work quite well. Also exploring Funambol (which is finally maturing) and services that make use of Funambol to potentially get more features than Google Sync offers, and it looks pretty promising. With this, I also don't risk having security policies imposed on my Blackberry by a 3rd party BES administrator over whom I have no control. I don't mean to suggest anything inappropriate might happen, but I personally prefer to cede as little control and risk as possible within the constraints of getting the services I need.
Also: re OWA - I'm using the IMAP interface with my mail provider (Google Apps / GMail), which gives me webmail and web calendar. Different feature set than OWA, but I haven't been slowed down by it yet. Also, after many years of being dependent on Outlook, I'm finding less and less to love about it. Under Vista, Outlook with an IMAP server is an embarassment, whereas Thunderbird performs beautifully with IMAP.
I'm realizing that, after 25+ years in IT, it's valuable to reevaluate assumptions about the environment and tools I'm using. I know this has dragged off-topic, and I apologize for that. I guess it's all a long way of my saying, "Thanks, but I don't see the value in switching to 3rd party BES right now". I appreciate the offer and wish you well, and I'm sure this will be a boon for many others. Just not right for me.
- Jon