The demand for information to be highly available for corporate decision makers is ever so more crucial, as technology develops. No longer are we prepared to wait until we return to the office to get back to important e-mails. Due to the fast pace that business has taken in the 20th century, we are all accustomed to rapid response. The situation has been fuelled by Smartphone devices being introduced into the market to meet such demands. One mobile communication device that has stood out in the competitive market is the BlackBerry Smartphone.
The BlackBerry Smartphone was introduced in 1999 by RIM, Research In Motion, a Canadian-based company, to support push e-mail by delivering information over the wireless networks of mobile phone service companies, along with its own wireless infrastructure. The BlackBerry Smartphone uses push technology, so e-mails are effortlessly routed to the user's device without the need for synchronizing the BlackBerry Smartphone. As push technology is utilized as opposed to pull technology — which was the traditional architecture of a Smartphone — e-mails are delivered to the device in near real time, without the user having to poll the server to see if new mail has arrived. This architecture means that when an e-mail arrives in your inbox, a copy is immediately pushed on the BlackBerry Smartphone, which has increased their presence widely in all types of organizations.
For inexperienced IT administrators, the prospect of managing these high-end devices loaded with sensitive corporate information can be a nightmare. As the demand for BlackBerry devices grows within the corporate environment, the need for individuals who can expertly configure and administer the servers that support these devices will continue to expand. The BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), provides the capability to deliver data to BlackBerry devices, set and enforce security and management policies for the BlackBerry devices, and so on. In short, BES is a vital tool to make sure that you have flexible, granular control over the BlackBerry devices that you deploy across your organization.
The installation, configuration, and management of a BES can be far from easy. With the help of this book, you should be able to simplify the implementation of a BES in your corporate environment. This chapter looks at the new features of the BES version 5.0.
We look at areas that have been enhanced from the previous versions — BES 4.x.x and lower. We then finish the chapter with the Lab 1 — installing BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0 section.
BES version 5.0 has many changes, but there are two prominent changes that will captivate administrators who ever worked on any previous versions of BES. The first is the new web-based interface that has replaced the cumbersome BlackBerry Manager console. The new management tool — BlackBerry Administration Service console (also referred to as the BAS) allows administrators to use Microsoft Internet Explorer along with Active X plugins to control and administer the BES.
The second prominent change is the high availability built-in feature of BES 5.0; this allows us to plan for a disaster recovery straight out of the box. Unlike previous versions of the BES, where we had to look at third-party applications to help us create disaster recovery scenarios, BES 5.0 allows us to do this out of the box. The high availability component takes care of SRP lockouts, therefore no additional license is needed for the standby server. Server Routing Protocol (SRP) is a unique identifier that is used to communicate and authenticate your BES server with RIM BlackBerry relay circuit. In the previous versions, if the same SRP was used on two different BES servers in the same domain then the SRP would automatically lockout and one of the BES servers would be disconnected from the RIM relay circuit. This made planning for a disaster recovery more expensive as you would need to have purchased an additional SRP (which in essence is an additional copy of the BES software) in order to implement a successful disaster recovery plan.
Improvements have been made to the existing IT policies. BES 5.0 now provides an additional 200 more configurable IT policies as opposed to the earlier versions of BES, which we will look at in Chapter 4, IT Policies, followed by a lab examining IT policies in more detail.
As the need grows for not just e-mail messages being able to be viewed and delivered on BlackBerries but also to have a full Instant Messaging environment available on a BlackBerry device, this can be provided by Microsoft Live Communication Server (LCS), which will enable us to deploy a robust Instant Messaging solution.
With BES version 5.0, a monitoring portal (provided via a website similar to the BAS) is included in the installation process. In the previous versions, the monitoring tools had to be downloaded and installed separately. The monitoring software provides health scores to check the BES performance and a much more stable and robust Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) architecture is employed in BES version 5 (further information on SNMP can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNMP).
General administrative failures relating to managing users and groups have also been addressed in BES 5.0, such as the ability to have users in more than one group, the ability to nest groups (place a group inside another group) and for the BES to then work out the correct effect IT policies, software configuration policies and security rights that should be applied to users when they find themselves in multiple groups. In the previous versions of BES this was not possible. We will examine this in more detail in Chapter 4, IT Policies.
Note
Similar to the Microsoft Technology of when users are in different security groups and the effective permissions are worked out except in the case of BES, the least restrictive role applies, and the highest ranked IT policy will be applied. Also note, these groups are created logically on the BES and have no correspondence to groups that exist in Active Directory.
The delivering of apps to BlackBerry Smartphones via the BES has also vastly improved. Now we can create and house a robust application repository, which allows us to create application lists to ease the management of apps as seen later in Chapter 5, Software Configuration and Java Applications.
There has been much improvement for the end user as well, with the launch of BlackBerry Device Software, version 5.0 software. Users can now see flags for follow up, and can manage and synchronize e-mail folders to make message filing simpler.
Another obstacle in the previous versions of the BES was the ability to only synch the main Outlook contact folder, which resides in the user's mailbox. In BES version 5.0, we have the capability to synch multiple address books within Outlook. The improvement is extended by allowing us to also synch distribution lists and contacts that reside in public and shared folders. There is also a new feature that allows the BlackBerry devices to access data directly from your organization's corporate LAN. This means that any shared folder, which has important information in it — that resides on the corporate LAN — can now be accessed securely, directly from the BlackBerry device.
We can now also push BlackBerry firmware updates for the devices by using OTASL (Over the Air Software Loading), as seen in Lab 5.
Other advances in Microsoft Exchange have made the prerequisite setup more manageable due to the ability of the Microsoft Exchange to use a command-line shell. We can now apply and change the permissions more swiftly for user accounts.