Separate Work and Play with “BlackBerry Balance”

RIM Vice President Alec Taylor was in Boston yesterday at the Marriott Copley Place downtown to talk about why businesses should bet on both the BlackBerry and the BlackBerry PlayBook. They are pushing “BlackBerry Balance” and more!

BlackBerry Mobile Voice System
“Launching in early 2011, this is an update to RIM’s effort to unify the desk and mobile phone, offering a single identity, voiceover Wi-Fi calling, a single voicemail box, dialing office extensions and more. RIM says the new version will support more types of business phone systems.

It really seems like RIM thinks there is something to this employee liable device trend. Their latest attempt to grasp that market is with a new push called “BlackBerry Balance” that RIM introduced at a business event in Boston. I was always curious why these larger companies would care about employee liable devices but maybe they are hoping to cash in on the devices their employees already have. That way employees that cannot justify a work paid device can have a home on their own BlackBerry.

RIM has been trying to do this by separating the business and personal parts on the BlackBerry but it has definitely been a work in progress. For example, there is still no good way to have two different contact lists on a BlackBerry. RIM has the functionality there but doesn’t give us access to it.”

BlackBerry Balance
“A new effort to support mixing personal and corporate data on the BlackBerry. RIM is adding features such as the ability for IT to choose to wipe only corporate information from a device or to limit users from cutting work data and pasting it into a personal application or email. Other features include warnings when sending emails or calendar invites outside of the organization, the ability to encrypt media cards and options for preventing access to work data by third-party applications.”

BlackBerry client for Microsoft SharePoint
“Launching in early 2011, this will bring data from Microsoft’s portal software directly to BlackBerry handhelds. It will work with both the 2007 and 2010 versions of SharePoint and integrates into a number of BlackBerry programs, including E-mail, calendar, Documents To Go and the browser.”

PlayBook
“As for the forthcoming tablet, RIM says it will ship with 1GB of memory, have 16GB, 32GB or 64GB of flash memory, include a 3-megapixel front-facing and 5-megapixel rear-facing camera and have micro USB and Micro HDMI ports. (I can’t remember if they have said all of that before.) The slides say only that it will ship this quarter and will be “competitively priced,” reiterating past company positioning.

According to the slides, the company also plans to talk about cloud-based device management and changes to allow one BlackBerry server to support multiple corporations.”

Source: AllThingsD

Share/Bookmark

Separate Work and Play with “BlackBerry Balance”

RECENT NERD NEWS