We have been hearing about RIM’s collaboration with Microsoft for a RIM hosted cloud BES since BlackBerry World. That product is finally starting to come together in the form of BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365. It is a RIM hosted BlackBerry Management Service for Microsoft Office 365 hosted Exchange. RIM is saying that a number of Fortune 500 customers and several government agencies have been testing the system out for a bit now and it is now ready for public beta. The best part is that BlackBerry Business Cloud Services is available for no extra charge to Microsoft Office 365 Midsized Businesses and Enterprise Plan subscribers and works on both BES and BIS BlackBerry data plans.
You can sign up for the beta at blackberry.com/beta/businesscloud or read more about it at www.blackberry.com/cloudservices and below:
Single login
- Log in to the BlackBerry Business Cloud Services using the same credentials that you use to access Microsoft Office 365
Powerful and familiar administration
- Look and feel similar to the BlackBerry Administration Service for the BlackBerry® Enterprise Server
- Manage individual user accounts, groups, and your entire organization all from the BlackBerry Business Cloud Services web console. You can also activate BlackBerry devices and send wireless commands.
Wireless activation
- Activate devices over the wireless network and associate them with the BlackBerry Business Cloud Services
Support for personal devices
- BlackBerry Balance allows for an employee’s use of a single BlackBerry smartphone for both work and personal without compromising the security of corporate data. This feature is available on devices running BlackBerry® 6 or later.
Instant messaging
- Supports BlackBerry® Messenger and consumer instant messaging applications available from the BlackBerry App World™ storefront
Data protection
- Uses AES as the symmetric key crytographic algorithm to protect data that is in transit between the BlackBerry Business Cloud Services and devices
- Protects the connection between BlackBerry Business Cloud Services and the BlackBerry Administration Service using HTTPS
- Provides IT policies and IT administration commands to control the behaviour of the device
Web-based self-service
- Allows users to switch devices, back up and restore data on devices, set their own activation passwords, or send wireless commands to lock or erase the data on devices
User features
- Supports all of the messaging features that users expect with BlackBerry devices, including wireless email reconciliation, email filters, email forwarding, signatures, out-of-office reply, contact lookup and updates, attachment viewing and downloading, personal distribution lists, personal folders and subfolders, follow-up flags, calendar event forwarding, availability viewing in meeting invitations, and so on
For more information, including system requirements, please view the Feature and Technical Overview.
