With public outcry over services and products lacking, and with turmoil at the very top of the company’s hierarchy, RIM is certainly in trouble right now. But just because its marquee product has been delayed a year or so doesn’t mean that all hope is lost, nor all development stopped. This is evidenced by today’s announcement of BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365.
“This new cloud-based option allows customers to cost-effectively support mobility across their organizations and easily manage and secure their BlackBerry deployments,” said Alan Panezic, Vice President, Enterprise Product Management and Marketing at Research In Motion.
Key features include:
- Wireless synchronization with Microsoft Exchange Online email, calendar and organizer data from a BlackBerry smartphone
- BlackBerry® Balance™ technology, which presents a unified view of work and personal content on a BlackBerry smartphone while keeping the content separate and secure
- An intuitive web-based console for IT administrators to provision, manage and secure BlackBerry smartphones from anywhere
- Online access to employee self-service smartphone security functions, allowing users to easily reset a device password or remotely lock or wipe a device in the event of loss or theft
Pretty much, what this means is that BlackBerry users of Microsoft Office 365 and Exchange—a component of Office—will be able to access their remotely stored files from their BlackBerry devices. This may not mean much for your Average Joe smartphone user, but for businesses this is a big deal. Big business services are what got RIM its glory in the first place and, in this humble editor’s opinion, are what RIM needs to refocus on if it wants to stay alive.
[BlackBerry via BlackBerryRocks]
