ORLANDO – Research In Motion’s launch this week of its new
BlackBerry 10 platform won’t be limited to a telecast from New York beamed around the world. Company officials are taking advantage of every opportunity to extol the virtues of BB10, including here at the annual IBM Connect enterprise conference.
In a Tuesday morning session, a RIM executive shared more details about BB 10’s capability to separate work data from personal data through BlackBerry Balance, one of the marquee differences between its new mobile operating system and the competition. It allows users to switch back and forth between two profiles – one secure and more managed work profile, and a more open personal profile. It’s designed to keep both IT administrators and end users happy.
“With consumerization, everything changed,”
Mark Howden, senior manager of enterprise technical partnerships at RIM, told the session. Balance “was the experience most customers provided feedback on. They hate having to leave the native experience on the device and going into something else.”
(BlackBerry Balance can segment handset data. ITWC graphic)
Activating a BlackBerry 10 device on
BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 will result in a work-safe secure perimeter being created on the device, Howden says. All of the apps that reside in that space maintain a permanent virtual private connection (VPN) behind the firewall, allowing them to seamlessly exchange data with your corporate servers. The “work” side of the device can be locked with a passcode while the “personal” side remains freely accessible, and users just tap a touch button to switch back and forth.
Administrators will be able to customize the BlackBerry World apps that are accessible on the work side of the device. Firms can distribute in-house built apps and choose the public-facing apps from third parties that are accessible in the app store.
RIM [TSX: RIM] will also be taking its famous push technology to the next level, according to Ed Bourne, senior enterprise developer at RIM. Previously reserved just for e-mail download to the device, enterprises can now use that same invocation framework to control what apps are associated with certain file types on employee devices.
“You can control and manage how you want things to work,” Bourne says. “You can send attachments to employees and it can be opened by the app you built.”
The invocation framework allows applications installed on the device to claim priority over certain file types. So Adobe Acrobat can set itself up to open all PDF files, for example.
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There are a few other differences determined by the virtual line in the software that is
BlackBerry Balance:
· ---BlackBerry 10 will be able to run Android applications (compatible with Gingerbread version 2.3.3) but those will not be accessible on the work data perimeter, only the personal side.
· ---Personal applications won’t be able to access work data or attach work files to personal e-mail messages or calendar entries. But work applications can access personal files in this way.
· ---RIM’s Management Studio will be able to connect to both BES 10 and BES 5 versions. The servers can support up to 10,000 devices now, up from 5,000 devices, and supports multiple devices per user.