Monday, November 08, 2004

Why Blackberry Enterprise Server Sucks

By now, most everybody has heard of blackberries, for those who haven’t, they are little handheld devices that deliver your e-mail over cellular networks. It’s a great concept, but the server component, often deployed by companies, doesn’t execute the task very well.

Today’s problem, one of our sites went down early this morning due to a power outage and is not expected to be back up until 2:00 PM. There are 36 users on the mail server at that site that also have blackberries on one of our corporate blackberry servers. This blackberry enterprise server holds about 500 blackberry users, the recommended limit given to us by RIM (the people who make blackberries). Anyway, this site being down is causing the functions of the blackberry server to be so slow it is unusable. The 464 other users on this bb server are left w/o their blackberry because 36 of them are on an e-mail serer that failed. This is just silly, they call it Blackberry "Enterprise" Server, you would think that it would be able to handle something like this.

All the end users know is that their blackberry isn’t working, it will be our fault somehow. It isn’t like we have a choice of server software to power blackberries. That is where RIM gets you, they don’t have to make it good, because you don’t really have a choice.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

So how does the power at the power company go out? :)
-Brian

Joseph Durnal said...

Don't ask me. Actually, the office was a gas division office. That is why they call them Energy companies now.