Research In Motion has launched a new technology that allows employees to use personal BlackBerry smartphones for professional use, or in turn the company-owned smartphones for personal use.
This new technology, called as BlackBerry Balance, will thus allow businesses to secure, manage and control confidential company or client information on these devices. This also helps employees to maintain their privacy.
“BlackBerry Balance is a win-win for employers and employees,” said Jim Tobin, senior vice president, software and services at RIM.
He added, “It’s a secure and cost-effective way for companies to keep employees connected and productive, while also allowing the flexibility for employees to carry a single phone.”
BlackBerry Balance presents a unified view of work and personal content on a BlackBerry smartphone while keeping the content separate and secure. The division between work and personal content is transparent to the user unless they try to perform actions prohibited by company policy.
IT administrators can set policies via BlackBerry Enterprise Server or BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express.
These policy settings can enable secure access to business information while preventing the information from being copied into, sent from or used by personal applications like Facebook, Twitter, Hotmail, GMail or Yahoo! Mail accounts.
This function will also prevent business data or files created by business applications to be used by personal applications. If a user attempts an action that is prohibited by IT policy, a notification is displayed on the device.
The best part of it is that if an employee leaves the organisation or if the device is stolen, an administrator can remotely wipe business information (also personal information in case of stolen device) from the device while leaving personal information intact.
It is available only on BlackBerry devices and can be applied to employee or company-owned smartphones. It is built into BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0.3 and BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express 5.0.3 (available this week) for Microsoft Exchange or IBM Lotus Domino. It also requires the latest version of BlackBerry 6 Device Software.
Blackberry 6 OS is currently available in all new Blackberry phones. If you are using device with older OS, you can always update it to the Blackberry 6 (supported in all the newer Blackberry phones, for older phone you will need to check if the update is available).