[David Hannon]

I'm new to this whole Blackberry environment. I've been in charge of our company's wireless phone services for years (dealt with just about every provider out there - Nextel, ATT, Cingular, Sprint, and currently, Verizon) so I'm nearly an expert on that but know nothing of the Blackberry. We are going to be getting all our people Blackberry's for a number of productivity reasons and one of them is for us to help track our workforce. Is the ability to do this through the Blackberry a service provider specific issue, a third party software deal, or is it proprietary to the device itself? Along with other considerations, this may determine whether we stay with someone like Verizon or move to T-Mobile, etc.

As I say, I am very new to this whole thing and would love to hear any feedback on the kinds of services others have and their ease of use, functionality, etc.

Thanks for your help,

Dave

[Dawg]

What kind of tracking are you talking about
Productivity or the location of a particular employee?

[David Hannon]

I guess both. I'm sure the "higher ups" will want to be able to track the location of individual employees but for my uses, I'd like to track productivity.

[NJBlackBerry]

How do you track the productivity of someone using a BlackBerry? What are you looking to measure?

[Dawg]

Well Nextel offers gps tarcking on their units so you can see with 100 feet of where an employee is at all times I have this on my wifes phone. Because my daughter carries it when she goes out. So we always know where she is at all times.

Originally Posted by David Hannon

I guess both. I'm sure the "higher ups" will want to be able to track the location of individual employees but for my uses, I'd like to track productivity.

[David Hannon]

We have numerous field reps with scheduled appointments/meetings on a daily basis. As they input (through email?) their various completed appointments (and pertinent info from the meetings) we would at that point know not only the qualitative aspects of their meetings but also their scheduling and on-time status throughout the day. The GPS function would I guess automatically give us locations so that alone would tell us something we need, but not the qualitative aspects that were resolved (or not) during the visits.

Question: As I am new to this, wouldn't laptops/cell phones do the same thing in conjunction with the use of the current Verizon system? (That is, allow real time tracking of employee movement and data transfer to the corporate office). We wouldn't have the portability and would need 2 pieces of equipment instead of just one - the current cell phones and their laptops. Actually, this would be less functional/flexible which is why we'd like to get the Blackberry. Often, it would be overkill and not practical for our field people to lug a laptop onto a jobsite or to a meeting.

As far as the kids go, where was that when my daughter was in high school? Ha,ha. Great tip, though. I'll have to look into that with Verizon for my son's phone. Hope they offer it as well. Time to start now since he's just entering high school.