How BlackBerry Is Riding iOS and Android To Power Its Comeback 125
alancronin sends this excerpt from ZDNet:
"... the trend that brutally undercut BlackBerry phones during the past five years — the 'bring your own device' movement — is now driving significant sales of BlackBerry Enterprise Service (BES), the company's backend software. 'Our customers have been asking, "Can you just take what you've done on BlackBerry and put it on iOS and Android?"' said Pete Devenyi, BlackBerry's SVP of Enterprise Software. ... Secure Work Space will be an app in the Apple App Store and Google Play, pending approval from Apple and Google, respectively. It will include secure email, calendar, contacts, tasks, and document editing. It won't allow data leakage including copy and paste between Secure Work Space and the rest of the device. IT will be able to remotely wipe everything in the Secure Work Space without affecting any of the other apps or data on the person's device, in a BYOD scenario."
Copy and paste (Score:1, Insightful)
It won't allow data leakage including copy and paste between Secure Work Space and the rest of the device.
So, it's not a bug. It's a feature!
Already a few services out there (Score:2, Insightful)
This is exactly the same as Good ( http://www1.good.com/applications/good-for-enterprise [good.com] ) and Samsung Knox is something similar.
I wonder if they'll manage to carve out a place for themselves based on BES inertia. However, having administered BES, I sincerely hope they do the dodo.
Blackberry Enterprise (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Blackberry Enterprise (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I want one (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I want one (Score:5, Insightful)
can apple wipe just the 'work' portion and leave the personal (my email, etc) alone?
no?
then shut the hell up, then.
I was asked by the folks at my work to install exchange stuff so I can run outlook (sigh). I started the install when a dialog came up asking if I will grant 'whole device wipe' privs to the IT guys. fuck no! its MY device! whole system wipe? really? JUST because I want to install calendering from exchange on my phone?
I canceled and so far, my home phone has no work stuff on it.
it would be really nice to be able to keep them separate and risk-free.
apple has nothing like this, do they? normally, its an all or nothing wipe, just like outlook 'wants'.
Re:Blackberry Enterprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Blackberry Enterprise is one of those products that I really just have to scratch my head at. It has always seemed to me that encouraging users to treat as secure something which is easily lost, stolen, or damaged is a fundamentally flawed concept for a business model.
Are you insane? Or you just have no idea what a blackberry enterprise server (BES) does?
The BES manages strong encryption (AES by default) on the devices. The encryption keys are found only in two places: one the BES, and on the blackberry itself.
The mobile carrier doesn't have the keys, and RIM doesn't have the keys. So if a government comes calling with a warrant, RIM doesn't have anything to give them. It's a very elegant design.
The BES can force mandatory policies onto the blackberries, such as strong full-disk encryption, strong passwords, remote tracking, remote wiping, remote locking, wiping if the phone doesn't check in regularly, restricting what apps can access, and many, many other things.
There are a number of very smart & paranoid people at RIM who have thought long and hard about different attack scenarios and how to prevent them. That's why blackberry has been certified by many governments, NATO, and others: http://us.blackberry.com/business/topics/security/certifications.html
Unfortunately, the market doesn't seem to be interested in strong security and is far more interested in giving up all their personal/company information in return for the latest shiny device. Sad.
Re:Copy and paste (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not meant to be a feature to protect from users themselves leaking the data. I think it's designed against malware which could try to "emulate" user's behavior. Where does the user need to copy contacts from his corporate address book besides corporate e-mail which is provided by the same app anyway?
Why tablets failed before. (Score:4, Insightful)
People laughed at the Tablet PC concept ~10 years ago... I laughed at it too mainly due to the ~$3000 price tag back then.
They didn't laugh at the concept, they laughed at the (pathetic) implementation. Microsoft tried to overlay using a stylus on windows as a sort of keyboard/mouse hybrid which is NOT what a stylus is good for. A stylus is good for *drawing* and nothing else. We take notes with a pen and what we are doing is drawing. The fact that we can draw characters is just a bonus side effect. Microsoft fundamentally misunderstood how a pen/stylus works and what it is good for.
I would actually love a tablet with a stylus option with the condition that the stylus be used for drawing ONLY. Not navigation (like a mouse) or as mass text input device (like a keyboard) but as a drawing tool in the same way we use it with a pen and notebook. That would be terrifically useful. But so far every developer gets all excited about character recognition or mistakes it for a mouse and screws up the interface in the process. The reason tablets are working well today is because they finally designed systems adjusted the operating system interface to be designed for finger input from the ground up.