BB Experience & future

[marc@ion.lu]

Hello everybody,

I just wanted to report on my experience with Blackberry & Notifylink.

What we have:
- Different Blackberry models running Notifylink against a ZCS NE 5.0.* server
- Full syncronisation of mails, calendar, contacts and tasks

The good:
It works, we tried our way around a Sync4j/Funambol solution, but never got what we wanted. We have 10 internal users running around with their Blackberry's and are even confident enough that we started deploying it with customers.

The bad:
Main issue: price, since we are anti-M$, we didn't want to run a M$ server and are using Notify Hosted service from a Swiss Partner. About $20 per month per device so I currently give almost more money to Notifylink then I do to Zimbra, which doesn't sound balanced.

Small issues: Integration of calendar and contacts is great, but Email is not 100%, since it uses an external application rather than the original Blackberry one.
Example: in your contact list, you can't "Email Contact" because it will open the Blackberry app, rather than the Notifylink app.


Future:
As a service provider, I need to make money with my services and Notifylink is to expensive compared to other non-Zimbra based solution with other service providers offer.
The Zimbra BES (ZCB) would maybe be a way to go, anybody know how much you pay for BES licenses?

Notifylink has the advantage of being multi-device (not BB only) compared to BES. Maybe hosting Notify myself would be a better solution.

Last option I see is Sync4J/Funambol, but the lack in support makes it less interesting.

Anyone else has experiences that would help me along?
When will ZCB go out of Beta? into production?

Thanks a lot in advance,

Best regards,

Marc M.
ION
Luxembourg, Europe