BlackBerry Enterprise Mobility Suite Reviews

The BlackBerry Suite is used for mail, collaboration, instant messaging, and secure browsing.

It has improved the ability of our mobility users, such as business partners, to collaborate with their clients a lot more freely and without having to carry multiple devices.

It also improved the way all the applications work together. The activation feature was a big improvement from the UEM. It was a big improvement to activate applications with one authentication. That was a big plus for the user experience.

The most important would be instant messaging and the security that we get from the containerization.

When I say security, I mean policies that we can put down, not allowing our data to be leaked. Since we're a BYO shop - bring your own device - we like to make sure that the company's data is secure and not being leaked.

It takes a lot of time to export the logs, zip them, and upload them. With Good Technology, there was actually a feature from the GUI, right from the console, I was able to send the logs. I was able send my server logs to Good and that was very convenient. What I'm noticing now, and it feels like I took a step back, is that I have to zip logs again and upload them. And that takes a lot of time.

I know for the BlackBerry Connect, our users want to see more features, such as audio and video. I know the current version doesn't have that. I think that's one of the major features in the collaboration when it comes to the messaging part, the Connect.

It is very stable. I haven't had any major outages. The only issue we have, and I don't think we have too much control over it, is when devices, OS's such as iOS, do an update that breaks the application. That's usually beyond our control.

The scalability is great for our organization. I haven't had any issue with performance.

Technical support is above average. The only thing I would like them to improve is, when I open up a case, I don't want to have to see the script requiring me to tell them what version I'm on, what patch, serial number, etc. I feel that as soon as I open a case, that information should already be uploaded. I shouldn't have to give my version I'm running every time I open a case.

In terms of taking care of us, it depends on what the escalation point is. If it's an emergency, usually I usually get a call right away. We have Premium Support so we do get good support. In terms of the amount of time, sometimes they tend to investigate or we have to inform them to escalate to an engineer for certain things. But, overall, it's above average.

Previously we were a Good Technology shop and Good was purchased by BlackBerry. Before this product, we evaluated VMware AirWatch and I think the better move was just going from Good to Blackberry because, at the time, it was still the better solution.

The setup wasn't complex. It was a lot better than the older versions, and that is because they integrated the Good Technology. The Good Technology, I have to say, was really good.

It's a good, secure product. It still needs a little more development to grow. I would say test it and see if it fits.

Overall, I give it a strong seven out of 10. The reason is that work is needed when it comes to other platforms, such as Windows and Mac. But as for mobile devices, I think they're spot on.

My clients basically use the solution to manage their mostly mobile devices, and, increasingly, their desktop systems also.

My customers find that they don't have to worry about managing their VPN connections for their mobile users. BlackBerry handles all of that, as opposed to if you're just using Office 365. In that example, you could manage mobile devices with Office 365 Intune, except that then you have to worry about the VPN connections you have. You have to manage all those connections to your internal sources. BlackBerry basically handles all of that for you.

The Cylance integration is, if they do it right, excellent.

The technical support for the solution is excellent.

The integration with Cylance is not complete yet. Cylance does mobile security, which Blackberry bought. Blackberry is currently trying to reprice this solution with Cylance integrated within it, however, it's not complete as far as I can tell. They need to better integrate their mobile security features.

One fault that BlackBerry has is its salesforce. Their direct salesforce department is changing its salespeople constantly. One client I had, over a period of about three years, went through four salespeople. That continuity is a problem, in terms of dealing with the customers.

In the end, I become the only constant - myself, and the support team. The support team helps because they're basically dealing with the customer day-to-day and answering questions. It's an issue that BlackBerry needs to address. BlackBerry is making money. I think they're financially okay. 

I've been working with BlackBerry since 2003. I've been working on the Enterprise Mobility Suite for 15 years.

They have a big install base, so the solution is pretty stable. The problem is they keep trying to integrate new items. They keep buying new companies and integrating them into the platform. It's one thing to have it properly integrated. It's another thing to have it presented properly to the customer. The customer needs to become convinced it's a worthwhile addition.

The solution is very scalable. They're often deployed to large organizations. Scaling doesn't seem to be an issue for the product.

I've had clients that had about 18,000 users on Blackberry previously.

The support team is very good. They're very helpful at dealing with customers and answering their questions. My clients have been satisfied with their level of service. They're generally easy to deal with and more reliable than the salesforce.

The basic UEM is pretty straightforward. The problem with the initial setup is now with this new Cylance integration. It's not clear how that's going to go, as they just released it recently. I've only got one customer right now, who I've renewed a BlackBerry contract for. I'll have to see how that goes with the customer.

One of our current clients is using the management suite, which is the basic BlackBerry UEM suite. He bought it last year and he's been a BlackBerry client for 15 years with me. BlackBerry introduced this new capability to raise the price by almost double, and the client was unhappy. 

They didn't change the price, but they gave me more margin so I could discount the price to the customer. The customer now has signed on and he hasn't started to deploy the new suite yet, but he will in the next couple of weeks. At that time, I'll follow up with him in a couple of weeks and find out how it went.

I basically sell the solution and help explain to customers what they need to do in terms of implementation. They're getting their support directly from BlackBerry if they need it. Otherwise, they are deploying the solution themselves.

The costs have recently increased, since their acquisition of Cylance. They're attempting to integrate the technology into their product and charging quite a bit more for it as a consequence. Many clients are unhappy about this.

I'm a Blackberry reseller.

Many people don't realize that most of the cars on the road today use Blackberry software, from Tesla to GM.

I activate mobile services on every major carrier. Originally, I activated BlackBerry devices through BlackBerry's relationship with T-Mobile. Then when BlackBerry got out of the mobile business, as part of that process, I became certified on the BlackBerry enterprise server. Now BlackBerry is no longer really doing devices. You can still get BlackBerry devices, but they're not manufactured by BlackBerry. They're licensed by BlackBerry and they're Android devices. Therefore, basically am reselling BlackBerry UEM still.

BlackBerry is changing the solution a lot now. About a year ago, they purchased Cylance. They're integrating Cylance with BlackBerry UEM, and the customers, my customers who are BlackBerry customers, are having trouble understanding what the difference is. My goal is to understand that difference and explain it to them.

In terms of users considering using the solution, if they're running Intune, and are not worried about a VPN, probably the best approach is not to use this solution in a very small company. They probably don't need to worry about the features and shouldn't buy a BlackBerry enterprise server. On the other hand, if they're worried about security and want some of the end device security, then they should look at a BlackBerry Enterprise Server due to the fact that it integrates really well with Intune and manages VPN connections. 

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

The primary reason that we use it for is notifications.

Prior to BlackBerry Enterprise Mobility Suite (BEMS) or its predecessor, users could not be notified of their mobile messaging arriving on their device. They had to pull it, but this is a push function. Users rely on it. People want to know where to get devices when a message arrive. 

Whenever we have issues, people rely on the ability to check messages promptly.

The primary usage for BEMS is Apple pushing notifications for email. Without that, it does not work, but that is the primary feature for which we use it. There are secondary features, such as link, but it is not a critical feature. 

For BEMS, they could configure the secure documents to be easier to work with protective documents. However, this is not a critical app at this point that we use, so I am not chasing after it. 

From the past to the present, before mobility location, we frequently required a restart. The newer version is better in this regard. Things do not get disconnected as much as before when, for example, we do an Exchange update, then Exchange service was interrupted. When this happens, chances will be that we need to restart the enterprise core services on the BEM Server to reconnect a everyone. Now, this particular issue is happening far less than before.

The newer version is pretty stable.

For our company, scalability is not a problem. It is not even approaching anything that I would need to be worried about.

BlackBerry tech support overall is pretty good. We have premium support, so I do not have anything negative to mention.

Previously, we did not use anything else. In this company, it has always been BlackBerry and Good (which BlackBerry bought).

Every version upgrade has been straightforward.

We may have looked at other MDM solutions other than the BlackBerry line of products, but it is the product that is already in place.

It is a straightforward product, but it definitely needs support.

It is for our personal mobile devices.

Compared to the product that we upgraded from, we have received great responses from our end users who are appreciative of the following:

• They can access their calendar in events better than the other product that we were using.
• They can access their attachments.
• It is a faster connection. 
• The interface is much better than what we had previously. 
• It is overall great for setup. 
• It has good ease of use.
• It's intuitive.

• The security aspects of it. 
• Being able to access emails within the active sync.
• It is a secure container product.
• It having some browser capabilities and fast connectivity.

The console needs improvement. It does not provide all the information that we are looking for as far as who has installed a certain product. I understand this should be coming later, but it should be available now. There is a space for it now.

As far as being able to remotely wipe a device, or remove it from the console, this is not simple to do. It is not a one-click motion, as it requires several steps. So, clean-up on our side is not easy.

Trying to determine when enrollments have not been activated, or expired, is something that should be available within the console, but it is not there.

There are some gaps for our administrators to be able to do things a little bit easier.

As far as stability, for the majority of this migration, it has been pretty stable. I do not have any complaints about it.

For scalability, the information that we were provided initially, it has helped us be able to scale this out with what we are trying to do, which right now is just email and web. If we needed to scale out further for additional applications, we probably would have to make sure that we can handle the number of connections. At this point, we have been just trying to do an apples-to-apples migration, and we are scaled well.

We are used to calling in for Level 3 support. In some aspects, since it is a good product that was revamped for BlackBerry, it has had its hurdles. I am used to them knowing the product inside and out, but it does take a few cycles to be able to get up to speed as to what we need. 

A lot of issues that we are experiencing are being handled with upgrades. If it was just a simple how-to type of call, they are very good with that. If it requires additional troubleshooting and a deeper dive, with some of the issues that we have experienced, we have had to go find that person or two who knows the system very well. It would be beneficial to make sure that people are better trained for some of the tougher problems that come up with configuration.

We upgraded from Good, so we had no choice but to upgrade because it was at end of life.

The upgrade was simple, but it took a while to complete.

Over the years, we have evaluated other products to implement, but decided not to go with them.

The product that we were initially going to switch to, it had issues with being able to handle the upgrades that Apple was pushing. It caused some constraints with not being able to fully update their product and being able to update with the iOS updates. It caused a lot of confusion, so management was not satisfied with their level of response. 

Make sure you read the planning guides, so you can thoroughly plan your architecture accordingly.

• Mobile device management for 400 business owned iOS devices in Canada. 
• Container apps for secure mail, browsing, app management, and secure remote access.

BlackBerry UEM is an improvement over BlackBerry Good for Enterprise - barely. We have good policy control with mobile devices and have a streamlined provisioning process with Apple DEP and BlackBerry UEM.

When the product works, it allows us to secure these devices in a way we could not before, and have control over the iOS updates and applications that we lacked.

• Support is terrible for the most part. 
• The product releases are periodically unstable and cause further issues with the console and mobile devices. When the product is stable, it's OK.

Primary use is bring your own device scenario, not managing an iOS device, and keeping e-mails safely on our own private device.

We are using BlackBerry Work applications for accessing emails, calendars, and contacts. The users are happy to have an easy way to have access to emails on the go. The most important thing for us is to have quick communication by email and phone calls on mobile, because with many users, we are on the go every day, which is very good.

It is easy to use for end users. 

The security of the app is a valuable feature for us. It is mainly about storage data on the device and certifications. In addition, with longstanding BlackBerry customers, they appreciate it if you launched BlackBerry Work applications from a good technology company. Therefore, we introduced this product to our end users because it has the longstanding security name of BlackBerry on it, and we could use it safely on our side.

It is flexible to use. We can enroll multiple devices to use iPhone, iPad, and Android devices, with all that they entail. There is very high flexibility for different setups of single users, so it can give a single use many different device types with different enrollment types.

The newest features sometimes pop in very slowly.

It is a very stable product. We have around 400 users on it. They just use the BlackBerry Work application for about 5000 devices overall. The BlackBerry 10 device and Android are very stable and perform well in our everyday business.

We do not have any scalability issues at this time. We have enough service for quick communication on the devices. Therefore, we are very happy with it.

Sometimes tech support is excellent and very quick in replying and finding overages in detail. Other times, it is a very hard discussion when you are searching for something specific, and the system is turning over and over again. Overall, they are satisfying to work with though. 

I started with S4 years ago. I moved over to the latest solution over and over again, so S4, S5, S10, and S12. Now, we are using the latest version BlackBerry UEM, and we are not using another mobility solution in our company.

The initial setup was easy to do. The configuration and installation guide are very helpful in setting up a domain, and it is very easy to set up a new domain. As we are a longstanding BlackBerry customer, we are very familiar with everythign in the router.

The product pricing is fine. 

Sometimes, it is very hard to get an overview because there are so many different suites to find out what is the right thing for new customers. It is very hard to find because there are so many different licensing suite names. There is a whole suite, with four to six suite names, and they are all gold licenses and SIM-based licensing. There are very many options for us to choose from, which is good on one side, but on the other side, it is very hard to figure out what the best option is. 

We sometimes look into comparing whether it is still the best option to be a BlackBerry customer or moving forward to Citrix, or something similar. At the moment, we are very happy with Blackberry UEM, so we are not looking to move away from BlackBerry.

It has the easiest setup. You don't have to configure some picture changes in your firewall, and punching out holes in there. It has an easy infrastructure, which is very easy to explain, and very quick to obtain an overview.

We are able to get our hands on pre-release software and share our feedback safely with the product management. Also, this is the same in the case of feature enhancements. 

For the use case, we are a mobility organization. Sometimes we do, because we are a reseller or end partner, also we are running on a system integration business. Almost every time we promote or doing installation in customers, so we need to check our email from mobile or our notebook but we cannot do that on our site laptop. We BYO there.

For the example, I think for technical documents, technical, when we send any technical document or any financial document, we can send it consecutively with BlackBerry Dynamics inside BlackBerry Enterprise. Yeah. I think that's the common example on our business.

Cylance, their newest antivirus product, is the most valuable feature for us so far.
Then, for the BlackBerry Work also, BlackBerry Dynamics. We can editing some documents and deploy policy and we can [inaudible 00:06:55] the document or something, the image, to partner or our vendor.

For the purpose of better performance is we have some applications, internal applications, that work on document but when we did integration with BlackBerry Edit from BlackBerry Enterprise, yeah. I think that we failed. We failed on that integration.

We cannot integrate that BlackBerry Edit. BlackBerry Edit has issues for editing any document. We have other internal applications that can bring or field documents but cannot edit into BlackBerry Edit. There's room for improvement with editing documents.

When I was the [inaudible 00:09:48] for BlackBerry Enterprise, maybe they need to create... I'm so sorry. Because for month or once on a month, I need to delete database or some database logs from BlackBerry that use much [crosstalk 00:10:09]-

I think the database slow because the BlackBerry Enterprise, it have database that put inside SQL Server, so every month I need to check the hard disk if it is sufficient to handle the database files or not. Every month, I need to check hard disk, so if it's not sufficient or it's already full, I need to delete some logs.

I think on the UEM server, they can keep the database or hard disk performance, like approval. So from the UEM server, we can delete any file that is not used anymore. Yeah, something like that, I think.

We have been using this solution for one year. We use the solution on-premises.

On the stability, yeah. For the stability, I think they need to... How to say? Because we always [inaudible 00:15:08], I think they have a good, the stability. Did you mean about the updated, right? The patching?

Currently, in all organization, we have around... Just for ITS, we have around 30... Yeah, 30.
Some of them, their role is for the first, our country manager and then me and my leader. 
Currently I'm a consultant.

We didn't have any experience about the scalability but just under documentation, yeah. They support for high capability, but we actually didn't have any experience about that. When we [inaudible 00:16:29] we will think about that.

Maybe if we are going larger, our organization going larger, we will still use this product.
For this product, I mean in organization, we have an ITS, IT solution department, and this product is used for our department, only for department. Yeah, because our other department is for resell. They currently don't use this.

Sometimes we have an issue in BlackBerry on requests. Support for the... Almost for the issue, they have the solution but I think they can improve the support by enable any chat. Yeah. They need to do chat support because currently they have not. We can only call them via email or phone. They need to enable chat support.

I think only that because I have also seen their knowledge base on their support portal. They have most of the issues already offered on the knowledge base for them.

We have previously used Team on the Run to control. For the first, it's about security because we are... Our daily jobs of editing and project documents, like technical documentation or like how I said earlier, it's a financial document. Any project document, we have to secure it either to customer, sender, or also partner. Then, the business using.

When I used Team on the Run, I can't put the pros of the Team on the Run. I can locate wherever the engineer goes. I mean, I can locate their location. That's currently not available on BlackBerry Enterprise. They are ongoing. For BlackBerry Enterprise, they are ongoing features on BlackBerry Persona, I think.

I haven't implemented on our organization. For the BlackBerry pros, the security because on the less experienced but the other employees or the engineers can manipulate their location. It's in effect, GPS. 

It's in effect GPS. Then, they can actually... No. I mean, the differences between workplace and personal, it's... On the BlackBerry Enterprise on the mobile phone, we have personal and then workplace. We have two containers on our phones but on the other, on the TOTR, it's for only one. They don't have any containers.

I think for the people that join in IT business, in IT operations, that new on IT operations, I think that's complex on the setup. But some of us, I think it's not that complex.

I think the complex one step on the initial setup is integration to the Linux system. Yeah, because UEM server is... Integration to email server, you need to enable your email ActiveSync [inaudible 00:13:08]. Yeah.

When we implement our BlackBerry, I think it around one month to complete all integration and installation. We just installed single node on just UEM server, BlackBerry BEMS, or BlackBerry Enterprise Mobility Server and integrate to email server and integrate to the server. I forget. But yeah, I think it's all one month to complete.

When we deployed, we referred to the BlackBerry documentation.

We just need two workers to maintain the BlackBerry Enterprise. A common role in our organization, they can be an engineer for our internal organization and they can be also a pre-sales engineer to customer.

I think yearly basis because we just renewed the license.

We used BES UEM mainly for our regulated users to lock down devices. It provided us with extra security that we couldn’t achieve with other EMM solution.

It didn’t help us because we ran into lot of issues, and BlackBerry support couldn’t figure out the issues in a timely fashion.

I value the way BES UEM was able to utilize Android for Work-Premium in BlackBerry Android devices.

Second level support needs to have strong knowledge of the product. My issues were always at the developer level.