Google Apps adds push technology for Blackberrys
At long last, Google Apps will work with your BlackBerry! Well… kinda.
While many companies have opted to use Google Apps as their email system, there has been a problem that they did not offer push technology for getting the mail and calendar updates out to the handsets. According to Yahoo Tech, these problems are being addressed now, but not all of the features you want are quite ready for prime time as of yet.
First off, the service is only in Beta for right now and won’t be available commercially until the summer. For those in the program, your company needs to install a piece of software on their BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), and at that, it will only work on Microsoft Exchange powers BESs. Then, one more caveat, it can only handle 250 accounts per BES as opposed to the 500 per server Microsoft Exchange can.
Then comes the calendar problem. Changes made to your schedule on the server will push out to your phone, but changes you make from your handset will not sync back to the server. Two-way synching will eventually be available, but probably not to the end of the year.
As for mail, the BlackBerry mail application only allows you to search emails from the past 30 days, if you need to look further back than that you will need to go into a special Google Apps program on your phone to search further back.
While this is a welcome, and needed, turn of events for Google Apps, hopefully they will be making some necessary course corrections along the way. Google does plan to make some changes as they go, such as adding the ability to handle more users, but it may be quite awhile before this receives wide adoption by the enterprise community.
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