Description: Wireless email, as perfected by the RIM Blackberry®, might arguably be the greatest
enhancement to employee productivity since the cellular phone. It enables us to keep up with the ever-increasing influx of email and relieves us from spending hours catching up due to traveling or even from just going home in the evening. It allows us to remain connected to our co-workers
and customers as if we were sitting in our offices.
For most companies, this empowerment was simply a matter of deploying RIM Blackberry
Enterprise Server (BES) and distributing Blackberry handhelds to their employees.
Now customers and coworkers can find us to be more responsive, and we can be more
productive even when out of the office. Teamwork and productivity have increased as each team member is reachable when they are needed; there is no more having to wait until a person returns to a hotel room or office and starts up a computer. However, as is the case with most
technologies that are designed to help us work smarter and faster, there are new issues and concerns that need to be dealt with to ensure success. Now that customers and employees expect
to have anywhere/anytime email access, it is crucial that this system be protected from failures and other outages to ensure its availability. As employees have become dependent on this newfound
freedom, Blackberry deployments have gone from being “cool” and convenient in a pinch to being expected and a must-have.
What if this critical system goes down? Will employees and customers simply accept it and patiently wait until people get back to their computers to respond to a critical email? Not likely.
They may not even know that their lifeline has been severed and mistakenly assume that no news/email is good news and make critical decisions based on lack of information Blackberry has become a standard way of doing business and outages will not likely be acceptable as it is now taken for granted that email will always be accessible, wherever we may be.
If this scenario rings true for you, then whether your responsibilities include the Information Technology (IT) department or you are just a user of this terrific technology, you have an interest and/or a dependence on wireless email. And the thought of it NOT being available likely makes you a bit uneasy. So then the question becomes, “How do I ensure that my Blackberry environment is always available?”
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