Anyone using this Blackberry alternative?

[Guest Honest John]

My Blackberry users' contracts come up for renewal this year and I have been alerted to this alternative called Goodlink to the Corporate BES.

www.insitusolutions.com

Basically, this is a "push" service to Smartphones/PDAs running Windows Mobile 2003 (not sure about W5). Personally, I use a C500 and remote active sync and OWA, but have either to use a "connect once per hour" facility or a "do it yourself" one. Blackberrys get mail pushed as it arrives.

It seems that this solution gives the best of both worlds plus the ability to work on Office attachments - Blackberrys can't do that!

In addition, Corporate Blackberry connections are about £35 per month with phone calls on top of that. Using a Talk Plan with 4Mb data per month add on, 90% of the Blackberry users would get their calls and their Blackberry service for about half the current costs - less if Walk'n Web half price offer was used.

But the killer question, Does it work as well as the salesman says?

[Guest fluffcat1]

It seems that this solution gives the best of both worlds plus the ability to work on Office attachments - Blackberrys can't do that!

Hello,

an office editing app off the top of my head for blackberry is eWord from Dynoplex ( about £30 per licence ) - in a roundabout way, Dataviz's documents to go Java client should run on blackberry as well, though I've never tried, and when I worked at BTC there was an option to forward an attachment and have it scanned and sent back to the handheld as a picture for viewing, so not strictly true. Yes you have to buy it, but it is possible.

I've never heard of Insitu but it looks interesting, if you try it let us know how you get on.

Richard

[Guest fluffcat1]

As an aside, the Sierra wireless Voq came with VoqMail. It enables you to setup a VPN over GPRS and run outlook as if you were on a local network so in effect you have push email with only GPRS charges to pay. The phone didn't take off, the software was written by a 3rd party IIRC, and it works very well. Expansys still have stock at £99 per unit, although when they have it on offer it's £65 inc vat. Some versions they sold didn't come with voqmail though, and it's luck of the draw what you get :-(

Richard