Hosted BES for Scalix?

[billb3]

Do you know if there are any partners that plan to provide hosted BES for Scalix once it is out of beta? This is something we would be interested in...

[florian]

I think some of our hosting providers are looking into that, however I can't name any yet.

Would you be looking for Scalix on premises and only the BES portion hosted, or a fully-hosted solution?

Florian

[billb3]

Scalix on premises and only the BES portion hosted

[florian]

Haven't heard that anyone is planning to do this.

How many users would this be needed for and ... what's the point?

Florian.

[billb3]

Probably 15-20 users. We encourage our users to use Activesync-capable devices...but because some of the "higher-ups" insist on the Blackberry devices it is becoming a problem. Having hosted BES would allow them to have a full features BB and IT wouldn't have the problem of running BES or BPS.

We have been testing NotifySync & ActiveSync, but I doubt having to use a separate program to create/accept calendar invites will go over well with these users.

[florian]

Well, all I can say is that running a BES or BPS is a relatively minor effort and with the BPS, even cost is very manageable. I saw the actual setup for the first time when we engaged in the integration project, and it's actually really a good app to operate. It's relatively low on resources and happily runs in a VM, everything pretty much works as designed if you follow the instructions, admin-tools are slightly awkward at times, but reasonable and finally, and best of all, the thing uses outbound communication into the BES infrastructure all along, so a) it does not need to have a public IP address and b) it does not need any inbound holes drilled into your firewall.

So - given the integration product is in Beta and given I'm not sure whether and when any of our hosting partners starts offering such a partial service - I would actually recommend that you get going with this yourself.

Just my 0,02 - I don't think you'll regret it too much.

Florian.

[Gawainorgelly]

BlackBerry Enterprise Server at any time.It's only available for Notes and Exchange environments. BPS is based on the 4.1 code, but with a more simplified management tool, and a limited amount of patches are being released. (BPS is "stuck" at v 4.1.4, where full BES is at 4.1.6 plus maintenance Releases). As such BPS is missing out on some functions that full BES did get from SP6 onwards, such as rich content email, free/busy search, remote search.

[florian]

And the BES Exchange version, just to be clear, works with Scalix with our connector.

Florian.

[jangi]

Anyone know if BPS (or some small business version) 5.0 is anywhere on the horizon? Full-blown BES doesn't make sense financially for 10 blackberries. BPS doesn't make sense period. Why a company would sell a product (in 2010) that doesn't support HTML email or attachments properly is beyond me.

[echelon]

Notify Technology (http://www.notifycorp.com/) has a Scalix/Blackberry (or other devices) solution called NotifyLink. We went with to the on-premise version since, at that time, the hosted edition didn't support Scalix 10. I think with Scalix 11 is supported with a hosted edition. At the moment, all the blackberry users moved to Iphone's. We used NotifyLink 4.5 with BB and 4.6 with Iphones. They should be able to offer you a trial.

I have not a change to eval Scalix's ActiveSync or Blackberry solutions.