Software tracks BlackBerry messages
481381
Gwava, a developer of security software, plans to introduce on Monday a new product that lets enterprises easily track and find text messages and phone calls that BlackBerry users send and receive.The software should appeal to enterprises that need to comply with regulations that require them to track employee communications. Key to the Retain for BlackBerry Enterprise Server is that it doesn&#39;t require any client software. That means an IT administrator can manage it fully from the back end.The BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), which companies use to let workers send and receive corporate e-mail on their BlackBerry devices, already logs data about SMS (Short Message Service) text messages and e-mails sent and received. However, users must view the data in a giant Excel spreadsheet where each row is one transaction, said Mitch Lauer, director of business development for Gwava. &quot;It&#39;s extremely difficult to utilize,&quot; he said.&quot;Our software goes into the BES and makes sense of all these logs,&quot; he said. Retain shifts the data to a SQL database. IT administrators can then manipulate the data using a viewer that can be accessed on multiple workstations.On the viewer, an administrator sees a list of BlackBerry users and can view their history of e-mails, text messages and phone calls. The list of e-mail and text messages includes the actual messages as well as who sent and received them. The phone call list includes the phone number of the person who called or was called and the length of the call.Enterprises using BlackBerry phones can already easily audit e-mail messages because they run through a separate e-mail server, such as Microsoft Exchange. But tracking text messages is harder, and Retain lets administrators see e-mail, text messages and voice logs in a single view.The software also tracks Pin messages, which are text messages that BlackBerry users can send to each other in a slightly different way than text messages offered by mobile operators.IT administrators can also view data such as the top ten users of phone calls in chart form. To further analyze or investigate an issue, an administrator can also export the information into Excel.Retain for BlackBerry can also send alerts to administrators when specified keywords appear in user text messages.Gwava envisions many reasons that an enterprise might want to use the software, including to comply with regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act or Sarbanes-Oxley Act, to investigate human-resources issues such as sexual harassment, or to pursue legal problems such as intellectual property leaks, Lauer said.While similar offerings exist, Retain for BlackBerry has an advantage because it doesn&#39;t require any software for the BlackBerry phones, Lauer said. That makes it easier for IT administrators to manage, and also means that the capability is transparent to end-users. &quot;The biggest value proposition, besides the amount of work for IT to deploy the software, is that the device user can&#39;t alter or delete a phone call or SMS or Pin message at the device level,&quot; he said.Retain for BlackBerry costs 40 percent as much as an enterprise pays for its BES server, so users can take advantage of discounts that they may have realized when buying their BES, such as volume processing.&#160;
252541
Malicious programs that can delete address books. Junk messages that flood a cell phone&#39;s inbox. Stealthy code that uses Bluetooth wireless technology to sneak onto handsets.
210314
The company plans to make available an API that lets Palm OS-powered devices work with BlackBerry wireless e-mail services.
217608
New software allows recipients of spam to band together to target known websites behind the messages. The idea is to bombard the sites with messages, slowing them down and making them more expensive to run.
156240
Research In Motion (RIM), the manufacturer of the popular Blackberry mobile, has been left with a curate&#39;s egg to mull over for Christmas.
639917
I take it all back Confessions of an analyst A couple of months, I committed the cardinal sin of criticising a mobile device without actually having used one. When I posted my initial reaction to the BlackBerry 8100 âPearlâ here, I was bothered by the thought that RIM had sold out its loyal business users by bowing to the pressure of the consumer market and cluttering the most effective mobile email product line available today with a gimmicky track-ball and trivialities such as a camera and media player.â¦
699522
InfoWorld - Gwava, a developer of security software, plans to introduce on Monday a new product that lets enterprises easily track and find text messages and phone calls that BlackBerry users send and receive.
538562
Now head-to-head with Microsoft Mobile Workshop After dominating the enterprise mobile email space with the BlackBerry solution for so many years, RIM is no longer the only serious game in town. Despite a number of false starts, arch-rival Microsoft now appears to have closed the gap, at least in terms of forward looking commitment.â¦
608418
Research In Motion (RIM) is demonstrating a new BlackBerry Wireless Handheld that operates on 802.11b networks and incorporates both voice and data capabilities.
23770
Mobile e-mail device for business travelers extending its reach.
156284
Research In Motion and Facebook said Wednesday that they have integrated Facebook into the Blackberry smartphones.
740843
BT Group said that BlackBerry&#39;s always-on &quot;push&quot; technology also means that customers do not have to periodically connect to their email to check for new messages, as they are automatically routed to the handheld.
247755
Good Mobile Messaging 5 adds custom options and shortcuts for enterprise use.
703540
A few months ago I made a list of all the phone numbers I have. It disturbed me a bit.  I started with the usual trio of home, office, and cell. Then I added a BlackBerry (RIMM) that I use primarily for e-mail, but also the occasional call when my Motorola (MOT) KRZR runs out of power.
153884
Research In Motion is launching a new wireless BlackBerry in conjunction with its BlackBerry Enterprise Server software in an appeal to enterprise customers and developers of mobile-workforce applications.
265615
The second lengthy&#160;BlackBerry outage&#160;in less than a year has one consulting company advising clients not to rely solely on the popular smart phones for critical e-mail messages.Enterprises that really need e-mail responses in less than eight hours to run their businesses should have a backup for the BlackBerry, Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney said Tuesday, in the wake of a crash that lasted about three hours on Monday. They should also set up an independent system to notify them whether an important contact has received or replied to an e-mail message, Dulaney said.Late Tuesday, RIM said the outage was caused by a problem with an internal data routing system in the BlackBerry service infrastructure that had recently been upgraded. That upgrade was part of an ongoing expansion of the network, and this type of change had been done previously with no problems, it said.Monday&#39;s failure followed&#160;a longer outage in April 2007&#160;that RIM attributed to a problem with a minor software upgrade and a subsequent glitch in a failover process.There are about 12 million BlackBerry users worldwide, on a variety of mobile carriers. The crash Monday affected users throughout the U.S. and Canada, preventing them from sending or receiving e-mail or carrying out some other functions, though&#160;no messages were permanently lost, according to RIM.Gartner&#39;s Dulaney had harsh words for RIM, saying he had given the company a break after last year&#39;s failure.&quot;This does not appear to be a mission-critical system with the highest service-level agreements, and therefore, to entrust ... that a message will get to the end point is being a bit foolhardy,&quot; Dulaney said. He advises enterprises that are worried about dependability to ask RIM for details of its backup system and make their own decisions.After last year&#39;s outage, RIM said it would enhance aspects of its testing, monitoring and recovery processes.&quot;RIM has made significant investments to improve its system recovery infrastructure and processes over the last year, which enabled service levels to return to normal quickly,&quot; the company said Tuesday.&quot;They obviously didn&#39;t do as deep a dive as they needed to on disaster recovery issues,&quot; Dulaney said. But he acknowledged the failure could have been caused by something completely unexpected.The BlackBerry, which RIM introduced in 1999, quickly became the most popular tool for mobile &quot;push&quot; e-mail that automatically comes to a portable device with a wireless network connection. All current BlackBerry models are also phones, and the company now offers a wide variety of handsets with consumer-oriented features such as cameras, Web browsers and social-networking capabilities. But to get to and from the handhelds, e-mail messages traverse a complex system involving mobile operator networks, RIM&#39;s network operation centers and BlackBerry Enterprise Servers within companies.Adding consumer features and keeping up with rapid customer growth, such as adding 1.65 million users in the quarter ended last Dec. 1, have probably made it harder for RIM to keep its network running smoothly, said Albert Lin, an analyst at investment bank Sooner Cap. But users accept some level of risk if they want such complex services at reasonable prices, he said. The only truly reliable system is the public switched telephone network, and it has limited functionality, Lin said.&quot;When it comes to reliable push e-mail ... it&#39;s still hard to find a solution that works better than BlackBerry,&quot; Lin said.Gartner&#39;s Dulaney acknowledged that competitors, such as Visto and Good Technology (now owned by Motorola), are probably not significantly more dependable.It wouldn&#39;t be impossible to make the RIM network more reliable, the analysts said.&quot;They have the technical capability to spend more and make it more reliable, but is that what their owners and shareholders really want?&quot; Lin said.Google, for example, has a more highly distributed network, but that would take money and time, and many customers wouldn&#39;t want to pay for it, Dulaney said. In the future, RIM may choose to create a higher-end service with greater service assurances and a higher price, he said.
252140
Canadian wireless solutions provider Research In Motion - the originator of the BlackBerry portable e-mail concept has developed a new QWERTY-phone-keypad hybrid keyboard technology, SureType.