Blackberry and BYOD

Much of the interest in “bring your own device” is, admittedly, driven by employees’ interest in adopting devices other than Blackberry. But Blackberry isn’t dead and employees sometimes want to connect a personal Blackberry to the company BES.

This is a quick post to point out that most wireless carriers do not include permission to connect to a BES in the normal consumer data plans, and the personnel in the stores and on the phone may not even understand the distinction. I just had a user fighting for two weeks with Rogers in Canada to get his new Blackberry Bold to activate. In the end the problem was indeed that they had given him a data plan but not an enterprise data plan. This is not to single out Rogers — although you would think Canadian carriers would be a bit more tuned into all things RIM. But I’ve seen the issue with US, UK and European carriers over the years as well.

We might hope that carriers will get better at this as BYOD becomes more widespread but if a new Blackberry won’t activate, I would look to the carrier first.

David