Just a quick note. Fabian Williams – who’s blog is linked over there on the right – has produced an excellent list of

15 Considerations you should have when deciding on SharePoint Online Office 365

Which is well worth a look if you have any concerns or simply need a place to start when considering an online vs on-premise installation.

Today RIM officially announced the release of the Blackberry
Business Cloud Services for Office 365. The official release can be found here.
With this announcement I thought it would be appropriate to post a walk though
of the service and how it works compared to the on-premises solution. This guest-blog
was written by a good friend and co-worker Matt Nevans ( make sure to follow
him at @planettechmatt) who works alongside me at Planet Technologies as an AD Solutions Architect with
many years of experience in Messaging solutions. So without further ado, take it away Matt.

In early October, Microsoft and RIM announced public beta availability of the called BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for
Office365. Any tenant on an Enterprise plan can activate the service during the
beta period. The service can be activated through the Office365 admin portal by
your Global Administrator. To activate, just follow the prompts, accept the
agreement and the service will become active within a few minutes.

Once the BBCS service is active, a new admin section will show up on the main Office365 portal (see below).

The BBCS service utilizes a single sign-on token so that users can seamlessly
move from the Office365 Admin portal to the BBCS portal. When you open the BBCS
service for the first time, be sure to allow the add-on to run.

Once in BBCS management service, those familiar with using
BES 5 will find the management interface very easy to use. The BBCS management
service is based on the BES 5 platform so many of the same functions,
conventions and workflows are the same. For those who have not used the BES
interface I’ve outlined a few simple procedures below.

Unlike ActiveSync phones, BlackBerry devices must be
“activated” on the server first. This activation is independent of the actual
phone activation. The device activation allows any BlackBerry to connect and be
authorized, as well as download policies.

Some things to consider before BlackBerry Enabling a user:

• The user should already be created in the
  Office365 Admin Portal and be assigned at least an Exchange Online license
• Try and create and activate the user ahead of
  time as sync time between Office365 tenant and BBCS can take up to 30 minutes.
• The device should be in your possession as you
  need to enter the Activation PIN in order for the device to begin functioning
• Once a device is activated, its policies can
  only be removed by resetting the device to factory specifications which will
  wipe everything. Even removing the BBCS association will not remove any
  profiles applied.

To get started with a blank device, open up the Create a
User page under the User node in the BlackBerry Solution Management pane.

Enter a user to search for, this can be their email address,
last name, display name, etc. You’ll then get the ability to activate on the
next screen.

You now have the ability to perform a few actions. First we
will add the user to a group, in this case Travel. Second we will need to create
the user with activation password. This will allow us to specify an activation
password for this user.

Specify an activation password, confirm it and set an
expiration timeframe in hours. Typically the expiration time can be short if
you have the device with you, but it can be longer if need be.

Now, we just activate the Blackberry device like normal,
keying the users email and the activation password. The Blackberry will then
pull down the policy you specified in the steps above, in this case Travel.

If you want to modify your policies, you do that through the
Policy node in the BlackBerry Solution Management pane of the UI.

After you create the IT Policy, go to the manage node and
select the policy you created, click Edit IT Policy and we will explore the IT
Policy interface.

An IT Policy for BlackBerry is very similar to an ActiveSync
Device Policy in Exchange. It allows administrators to control, set limitations
and secure endpoint devices. We will configure a few common settings in this
example.

• Disable Provide Billing in BlackBerry App World
• Disable the Video Camera, but not the Photo
  Camera
• Require a 6 character password that user cannot
  disable. It should be alpha numeric and expire in 90 days. The device should
  lock at a maximum of 15 minutes.
• Disable external memory card

Once the changes are saved, you will need to assign the IT
policy to devices. To do this, we create groups and assign an IT Policy to
those groups, then add devices or users to them.

Create a group called Marketing. Once created, assign the
policy you created above to this group. As you notice, only one policy can be
assigned to a group. If you want multiple policies assigned to a single set of
devices or users, you should create child groups and add the users or devices
at the lowest level.

After the IT policy has been assigned, you can add users to
the group. Pull up the group information and click Add Users to group
membership. From here, you can search based on device or user to add to the
group.

The new device settings will now deploy to the user’s devices.

Overall the Office365 integrated BlackBerry Business Cloud
from RIM is a great addition to the management and device capability portfolio
of our favorite Cloud-based communication platform. Business Cloud services
offer most of the capabilities of on-premises BES services, along with the
reliability and security of Office365.