BES10 Bolt-ons?

[DavidUK]

Good afternoon all,

My organisation currently has 400+ users on BES v5.

From the carrier perspective these accounts have the 500mb BES5 bolt-on to allow them to connect to our BES - listed as "VB Data 500 BES 2GB WIFI 15" on our billing portal.

We're testing a seperate BES10 installation at present... in order to test my own account I migrated to the correct size SIM card for a Z10 and am now up and running.

I've since spoken to our Vodafone Partner who telsl me there are dedicated BES10 bolt-ons in two flavours, corporate and regulated...each with 1, 2 and 5gb usage allowances.

Can someone at Vodafone give me more information about these... I'm confused that my currrent number (with BES5 bolt-on) works fine with BES10/Blackberry 10 without changing the bolt-on?

Regards,

[grolschuk]

I was under the impression that all that BB OS10 devices require to connect to the internet and BES10 is a standard data plan.

Which I think is still correct, and why it is working with your BES5 bundle.

You may be worth changing the bundle from BES 500mb to a 1gb standard, as the data isn't as compress (if at all) so more will be used doing the same tasks.

However it does seem there are now a couple of bundles that supplement the BES server, and that is what you have been told about.

They link into the two licencing levels of the BES and guess work alongside the server to help things alone.

Regulated for example will only allow the 'work' side of blackberry balance to be enabled and lock the device down at sim level rather than BES level.

I would compare prices between a standard 1GB data pack, and the Corportate 1GB data pack.

If there is no difference go for the BES one, if there is, try and find out what extras it brings along.

Unless you are in a regulated industry that needs the locked down, audited, regulated features, you shouldn't need to worry about that.

[DavidUK]

I must admit - after originally looking into BES10 I shared that viewpoint... I thought if ActiveSync was now the underlying mechanism then we'd be able to save money on bolt-on's by having a potentially cheaper internet bolt-on rather than a dedicated BES bolt-on.

I have indeed changed my 500mb bolt-on for a 2gb BES10 "Corporate" bolt-on so we'll see how we get on - it actually came in slightly cheaper per month!

I was a little worried by a fellow test user who did the same thing (ie. just swapped his existing SIM with no bolt-on changes) and started getting alerts via SMS that he'd exceeded his data limit...I theorised this may be bolt-on related but I believe it has since been identified as a false positive as the billing portal didn't reflect this and our Vodafone partner informed us some alerts were being sent in error recently.

I'll need to look into the differnet licencing levels as you say. Ideally you'd hope to be in essence like-for-like, i.e. in choosing the corporate or silver level you'd have the same security features that BES5 does... unsure if the gold or regulated option builds on these or whether the corporate/silver is less secure etc.

[grolschuk]

As far as I can tell from the licencing levels, the main difference is the amount of policies offered to you, and corporate being more relaxed if you want it to be, where as regulated is hardened out of the box.

I know for one that i've no idea what half of the BES5 policy items do, let alone turn on/off ones that do make sense

Unless you are government/banking/etc that are regulated, I can't imagine you would want to go down that route.