Blackberry 10

Working professionally as an IT technician awards me some interesting circumstances.  Fleeting circumstances where I get a glimpse into someone's digital world, only to fix what is requested, and when I am done, walking away from the mess that is their world.

Today, that journey led me into the depths of Blackberry 10.

For those too lazy or tired to read it all, currently, I AM NOT a fan of BB10. the changes made to the data management, though minor, created hours of work for me and a few headaches.

okay, for those ready to follow along, let's ride.

First of all, how it was.  It was a confusing mess.  SOMETHING NEEDED TO BE DONE. So let us begin.
BIS. Blackberry Internet Service.  This was a server/service that was purchased by your mobile telephone service provider, which allowed for blackberry devices on their system to interact with the rest of the world.

All blackberries, with the exception of the Z10 (currently the only BB10 device available), first send their information to the BIS server, before it leaves and goes out towards it's final destination.  The purpose of the BIS server is clear: to encrypt and compress all data going to/from each device, and facilitate connection to the internet, email, BBM, etc.  Without your mobile service provider having a BIS server, your blackberry would be little more than a really expensive dumbphone. It would be IMPOSSIBLE for any data communication to take place without the BIS server in the mix.  This means no internet, no BBM, no messenger apps, no new apps at all, no email, nothing. just phone calls and text messages.

With the implementation of BIS, accounts were necessary to manage your account, for the purposes of transferring settings/restoring backups from a lost device to a new device. You could also login to manage email accounts and other mundane chores you can also find in the depths of the settings and setup menus.  This also meant that blackberries were portable, that you could have them on your account, or remove them, transfer your settings to a new device... etc. each blackberry uniquely identified with an 8 digit hexadecimal PIN connected to an account.

Groups of accounts could also be managed under certain circumstances. eg. in business. a business could have a master account to manage several blackberries, each of those blackberries would still have their own account and login username and password.  It gets complicated pretty fast, but I think you get the drift.

NEXT, we had the BIS servers, each with their own unique branding, by service provider, able to provide email addresses. Basically, if you were with, for example, Bell (I'm using Bell since it exists both in Canada and the USA), then you may have been able to get a blackberry with an email account like name@bell.blackberry.net - or something similar.  The BIS servers would facilitate the delivery of email to/from these addresses and would provide backup for 2 weeks worth of email; this also meant if your blackberry was off, you would still have email, it would just buffer on the server until your device came back online to retrieve it.  So now we have two logins for blackberries, one for your BIS account, the next for your email account.

In addition to these logins, you have two places to login to, one for email, one for account management. joy.

a number of years back, blackberry in their infinite wisdom decided to impliment a new account management system, separate from BIS accounts, called BLACKBERRY ID or BBID for short.  your BBID would track ALL your email accounts and became a single sign-on to associate all your information, apps, passwords, emails, BBM, etc. all into one point of entry.  Which is convenient if you're not near a PC and you want to get rolling as quickly as possible with a new device. get a service contract, setup your BBID, and you're off to the races.

This, of course, makes things confusing, since BIS and BBID basically do similar things, except BBID is a bit more broad, but convoluted, which settings are ACTUALLY backed up and to WHERE? these questions are not easy to answer, however, I do know that the quickest way to migrate from one device to the next was to transfer all the settings using the desktop app, then associate the BBID for the user. almost everything would set itself up.  In theory, you never have to touch their BIS account, so many users STILL don't know what their BIS login even IS, nevermind what it can do, or why it would be important to them.

What's important to note here is that your Blackberry email addresses, which almost everyone has, whether they use it or not, plus the device management account, are both on the BIS server. with BBID taking up the rear, managed by Blackberry.

What RIM did with BB10 is to remove the requirement to have a BIS server entirely.

To the people who never even knew they had, or at least had the option of an @blackberry.net email address, and to those on the very high end (corporate-wise), they probably won't notice much of a difference, since corporate blackberries use BES already; more on BES in a minute. it's all the people in the middle that ACTUALLY USED their @blackberry.net email addresses that are going to get screwed by upgrading to 10.  They don't even know it's coming.

I spoke to Bell today for a client, the only consolation the tech could offer me for my user was "I can forward from their blackberry.net address to any place you want" - thanks. that's not helpful.  not in the situation I was in anyways (I won't explain).  Quite frankly, in my opinion, this is a poor business move. quite frankly, the idea that, without anything else, a user could pick up a blackberry and get email for no other reason than they have a blackberry.... that's pretty good. now users will have to resort to one of the many free services, among others, hotmail, yahoo and gmail.  Not to knock gmail, I use and love it, but if I want to present that level of professional image, a blackberry address makes a statement.

So, no more mail @blackberry.net. goodbye for good.... at least, until RIM determines it was a terrible idea and lose another massive chunk of market share...

seriously, do they not even realize WHY people buy their devices?

....okay, last note, about BES - BES or Blackberry Enterprise Server, is a separate product designed to integrate with in-house, IT driven mail solutions, such as Exchange, to facilitate Blackberry connectivity to existing accounts.  The full version costs thousands to purchase, licence, and deploy, thousands more per year to licence, etc.  it's not a great solution unless you're managing several hundred ore more blackberries. For smaller business there's also BES Express, which is a light-weight version of the BES server; runs out of a browser from back-end processes.... but it's free.  Either way, the bastards that have a BES server plus exchange won't even notice, and should be able to migrate to BB10 without too much trouble (unless BES needs to be upgraded to support it).