Back in October of last year I noticed a new IT Policy rule for SharePoint pop up in BES 5.0 Service Pack 3. That gave us a pretty good hint that RIM was working on a SharePoint client for BlackBerry. Now thanks to Paul over at InfoWorld we have confirmation that such a client is coming out “early this year.” RIM is also working on a middleware capability for enterprise application integration that they mentioned before called BEAM (BlackBerry Enterprise Application Middleware).
The new SharePoint client will allow users to manage documents and SharePoint shares. It will also give access to SharePoint calendar events with integration with the email, calendar, and browser on the BlackBerry. It seems like it will be integrated with BES servers so expect it to require BES Premium and not BES Express. It seems like RIM is making these moves to make BES a popular solution with IT shops by providing functionality that other platforms cannot easily copy.
What do you think about RIM’s enterprise game plan. It seems to be forked with both BES Premium and Express along with a cloud solution coming soon. It will be interesting to see how the PlayBook plays into this whole environment…
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