(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — To improve mobile productivity and meet the ever-increasing demands of large-scale enterprise deployments, Research In Motion (www.rim.com) has launched its next generation push-based business mobility server software, BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0.
According to RIM’s Monday announcement, the new BES includes more IT administration controls and better integration between RIM push technology and Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Domino and Novell Groupwise. The new software also focuses on advanced security features and administrative tools that simplify the management and use of the BlackBerry within the enterprise.
“BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0 significantly raises the bar for advanced IT manageability, high availability, system monitoring and reporting,” RIM president and co-chief executive officer Mike Lazaridis said in a statement. “It has undergone testing in real world environments for over a year and is available now for customers.”
Before going into wide release, BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0 underwent testing in real world environments for more than a year, including deployments at organizations in North America and Europe including IBM (www.ibm.com), Linklaters (www.linklaters.com), and Tayside Fire and Rescue (www.taysidefire.gov.uk).
Also, as part of a number of announcements that coincided with BES 5′s general release, RIM and Hewlett-Packard (www.hp.com) also announced their collaboration on a number of features including HP CloudPrint for BlackBerry, which lets BlackBerry users print to any local printer. HP also announced software that centrally monitors and manages BlackBerry deployments.
RIM also rolled out a new API for its push technology, letting developers to push real-time content to BlackBerry smartphones.
Still in its infancy, BES 5.0 has already been awarded the Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ (EAL4+) certification, an international standard for evaluating security products.
RIM BlackBerry security group vice president Scott Totzke said BES is the first mobile platform to have earned this rigorous certification. “As a market leader in delivering secure, mobile solutions, RIM is committed to achieving independent, third party approvals and certifications of the BlackBerry security architecture,” Totzke said in a statement. “This achievement is a testament to RIM’s ongoing commitment to meet the needs of security-conscious businesses and government organizations.”
In an article on the BlackBerry Cool blog, Brendan Zivcic, who has tested BES 5.0 over the past few months, notes that the administration features have been especially impressive. “One of the best improvements in BES 5.0 is the more granular level of control admins have for role based administrator user accounts. You can add users to these groups, apply multiple groups to roles, and have multiple roles apply to a single user,” he wrote.
“Additionally, you can prevent certain users or groups from performing any changes on other certain users or groups. For example, in a 24×7 help desk scenario, you may not want to let the CEO’s account be accessed by anyone other than a few select users.”
