Great news to share this week. I (Alex Evans, Novell) got a call from my counterpart at RIM and they are releasing a public beta of their BES 5.0.1 for GroupWise. We have been running 5.0.1 in house for a number of months as part of the early adopter program, so we have been validating it against the latest GroupWise agents.

 

There are a number of new features coming to this version of BES that build on their strategy of secure and manageable mobility.

• Full SOAP integration (GW Client no longer required)
• Taking Personal Information Management (PIM) to the Next Level
• View Attachments in a Meeting Request and/or Calendar Entry
• Forward Calendar Appointments
• Multiple Personal Address Book synchronization
• New Web-based Administration Console (BAS)
• Improved scalability
• Better Mail Management
• Flag for follow up support
• Email folder management
• High Availability with Automated Failover
• Mobile Application Management
• 35 New IT Policies (Over 450 in total)
• Role-based Access Control
• Job Management, Scheduling, and Throttling
• Powerful Migration Tools (Enterprise Transporter)
• Open Document Format (.odt, .ods, .odp) support
• Remote File Explorer
• Securely access remote windows network file shares from anywhere!
• View, edit, save and email documents from your BlackBerry smartphone
• Leverages BlackBerry Attachment handling as well as Dataviz Documents To Go

Platform requirements
BES 5.0.1 will require Windows Server 2003 / 2008 and will run against GroupWise 8 Post offices only. As BES leverages many of the enhancements made to SOAP API in GW 8, GW 7.x will not be supported.

If you are interested in signing up for public beta you need to send an email to enterprisebeta@rim.com or sign-up at www.BlackBerry.com/beta and you will get download instructions in return.