RE the pop quiz, "name the [thing]"

[theweaselking]

I honestly thought I had more Exchange+RIM survivors who would have jumped on this sooner.

But: nubule and dantheserene got it right, I was talking about Blackberry Enterprise.

Pulling an explanation up from a comment there:

Blackberries before Blackberry OS10 had two modes, Blackberry Internet Service (BIS) and Blackberry Enterprise Service (BES). They're so close in name and acronym because RIM (now Blackberry) ARE THE WORST AT EVERYTHING HOLY FUCK.

Your BIS data plan was like a modern smartphone data plan. It gave you internet access and checked your email and let you do all the things a Smartphone does.... except connect to an Exchange server.

Your BES data plan was exactly like a BIS data plan, except it works with Exchange, and your Exchange provider's BES server, to give you Exchange access on your Blackberry. And it also tended to cost 5x as much.

This all happened forever ago. It's ancient history. It's 2006.

Since then, smartphones were invented and Microsoft created ActiveSync, which works to seamlessly provide Exchange access to iPhones and Androids and, once Blackberries FINALLY got somewhere close to modern, Blackberries. Activesync is also free, and works on a normal data plan.

But: Any iPhone, any Android, or any Blackberry 10 device, connects to Exchange through Activesync and Just Works.
Any Blackberry *before* 10 requires BES, which means it requires that the Exchange server have a BES server with BES enabled for the Exchange account (vendor #1) and your cellphone provider needs to provide a BES data plan (vendor #2), and then you need to do Enterprise Activation and push Service Books and all kinds of RIM crap from before smartphones were a thing.

My client has several Blackberries from before Blackberry 10. And my recommendation to get them onto the brand spanking new Exchange 2013 server was "walk into Best Buy[1], buy a fucking iPhone[2]" because that's SO MUCH EASIER.

[1]: Or Future Shop or Rogers Store or the cellphone kiosk at Costco or....
[2]: Or any Android, or even a Blackberry 10 device if you can't live without a phone that sucks, but NOT BLACKBERRY 9.

Comments

[skiriki.livejournal.com]

Okay, this actually explains why this was impossible for me to guess.

I live in Nokialand, after all. I am not even sure if we ever had any Blackberry presence at all!

[drcuriosity]

I think I've seen maybe four Blackberries in my entire life living in New Zealand. One of them belonged to a visiting American, and the others by extreme noophiles who had them imported back when they were The Future.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Blackberries were BRILLIANT and nobody could match their capabilities..... ten years ago.

[skiriki.livejournal.com]

Now, Nokia Communicators -- I could snark about that, since I had to deal with them now and then, but they actually managed to contact sendmail pretty okay, save for an occasional mailbox lockfile generation which went wonky now and then.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Actually BIS could talk to Exchange, it just couldn't do the fancy push stuff - so you had to wait 15 minutes for your mail.

Blackberry sent me a Passport to look at this week. This is a scary huge phone.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

Blackberrys could talk to Exchange (or Domino) via POP or IMAP. If you wanted secure end to end communications, enforced device policy, transparent web proxying, and all the other bits that made the BB the device that made corporate IT security dept's happy, you need the BES integrated into your Exchange (or Domino) servers.

Unfortunately, while Active Sync does MANY things better and cheaper than the BES, RIM still haven't been outdone completely. A Blackberry tied to a BES is still the most secure mobile device out there. It's also the one senior management love because old guys with shaky fingers have real problems using a soft keyboard on a tiny screen.

[nsanity-au.livejournal.com]

TBH - I still don't think Activesync does *anything* better than BES - but that is because ActiveSync can't actually touch everything that BES can, nor does it touch it the same way BES does.

BES is effectively an Outlook Client to Exchange (well Outlook 2010 and prior - MAPI), ActiveSync is some bastardised elder brother to EWS.

In terms of is ActiveSync a million times easier to setup and use, and even when it fucks out who cares because you just lose the profile on the device and put it back - yes Barry, ActiveSync is better.

[andrewducker]

We still have some Blackberries at work.

But also a different mail system we can install on Android/iPhone to get work mail on them. And that now seems much more common.

[thornae.livejournal.com]

Bit late to the party here, but I read your previous post first and was like "It's probably that fucking Blackberry / Exchange bullshit thing." Something with which I had to deal briefly around 2005ish, but have very thankfully not had to touch in over a decade, and thus have quite happily forgotten all details thereof.


Anyway, yes, if your client doesn't take your eminently sensible suggestion, suggest they transition to a more compatible technology for their old phones. Like fax, or bits of string with knots tied in them.

[nsanity-au.livejournal.com]

I've managed BB's and BES's and the like far too often.

1. Some Carriers offered BIS that would talk to ActiveSync (web portal that you put your AS details in and then BIS sent stuff to phone) - Voda NZ did this.
2.Carriers were absolute shitcunts at actually putting BES service codes on phones - see you werent' actually in complete control with BB till like... BES 10? Either way most of the time you ran up a new BB Pin (the Device Identifier), you'd have to hassle a carrier about 15 times to get your BES Service Book codes (they'd think you meant Blackberry, this BIS cos thats what they resold) on the fucking thing. This changed around BES 10 - Service books are now delivered directly from your BES and don't need carrier involvement.
3.BES till they brought in AS capable devices (before BBOS 10 btw, though not much before) was *fine*. It did require BES to have mapi access to Exchange - but in general if you read the BES doco, you'd never really have problems. BES Handsets used to not fuck out like ActiveSync of old used to (contacts, calendars used to just wig out majorly - requiring a dump of the AS profile on the handset, then re join).
4. In BES 10 land, if you have old BES-only handsets you end up with this giant evil behemoth of a config - there is about 5-6 different servers you have to install and get talking to eachother. This is 110% aids.
5. Apparently in BES 12 Land its all in one now. Why this is only a thing now, I have no idea.

[nsanity-au.livejournal.com]

FWIW ActiveSync existed since like Exchange 2000 (maybe even 5.5). Its just it was an unreliable piece of shit till like some Service Pack of Ex2003. Additionally - AS has no scope to touch Public Folders (No seriously guys i know we said in Ex2007 that PF were dead, but really they are going away this time right...) - whereas BES did because MAPI.

[nsanity-au.livejournal.com]

Specifically to your problem. Setting up a BES 12 w/o any MDM i believe is free - save your time to build the fucking thing - and resources to put the thing on.

If you want MDM - depending on the level you want - its like $120/handset for a perpetual license or like $60/year. And you can buy it all from the BB Store - and not from a carrier now.

I haven't looked into a BES MDM policies in a *long* time - but when BES 4 and 5 were a thing, they were the absolute "shiznit" if you needed to restrict handsets etc.

Not to mention that from a strict security standpoint, Blackberry was *always* a leader in the field. Very rarely did BB's get hacked (and even when they did, it was stupid shitty BIS ones, not BES ones). RIM used to attend all the fancy hacking conferences and rather than pull an Apple and try and sue clever people into oblivion, they employed them/paid them and secured their shit better.

Famously some criminals in Australia were using Mexican Handsets (because Mexico didn't track IMEI sales very well) with intl. roaming data plans and a BES service to communicate. Frustrated the shit out of law enforcement because the people who own the BES are the only people with the keys to break the encryption.

This whole thing may seem like I have a hard on for Blackberry. I don't. It has such a fucking narrow use case (Execs/Managers/Researchers/etc of Multinationals - where security *actually* matters), their handsets are somehow more fragile/buggy than when they had that stupid ball bullshit and in general i think the whole swipe up and what not rubbish sucks compared to Android/iOS (any of them).

I legit wouldn't set one up unless I had no choice in the matter.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

It's worth noting that we're dealing with *hosted* Exchange: Not my Exchange server, not my BES server, and security concerns are genuinely limited to "oh a salesdude's phone was stolen? Well, change his mail password and suspend his cellphone plan. Hey, was he signed into the corporate twitter? No? Okay."

Hence "you three with the ancient blackberries, we can either jump through all the BES hoops or you can walk into Best Buy and expense a fucking iphone. I recommend that second one."

[pappy-legba.livejournal.com]

Apropos of nothing, you seem to be mentioning 'iphone' with less bile these days. What has prompted that?

(I'm still on Android and won't be changing unless Ubuntu phone takes off in a big way. That said, the perpetual Android update clusterfuck, continued meddling by manufacturers and carriers, along with Google's refusal to patch the Webview bug on 4.4, has me less acrimonious to Apple than I once was.)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

iPhones still suck. They're just terrible, objectively worse in every respect than a Google product that costs half as much.

But I don't have to use the salesweasel's phone. And two of the salesweasels in question already use personal iPads. And for connecting to Exchange (which is the end of my caring about their phone) the iPhone is identical to a Google Nexus.

Combine that with the unfortunate habit of Android manufacturers of damaging the software, of carriers damaging the software, and the difficulty in explaining "No, you want a Nexus, from Google, not a Google Nexus from Rogers"?

At that point, "go to a store, buy whatever phone you want, the iPhone will work, I'm not paying for it and the cost is a rounding error on corporate levels, just make sure it's not an obsolete Blackberry" hits the limit of my caring.

[pappy-legba.livejournal.com]

Sounds like you're in a similar boat as me.

(One serious issue that Google is lagging behind Apple: granular permissions. There is some support for it in Android-- I'm using Cyanogenmod whose Privacy Guard is a wrapper around it-- but Google needs to take it mainstream. Possibly they have as of Android 5?)