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BoxTone Stars in a League of Their Own

While in Orlando this past week, a common question was asked time and again – “Which BlackBerry monitoring solution is better?” While I can agree with my colleague, NJBlackBerry, and his Best of WES recommendation to find the best solution for your requirements, I have found a solution that goes above and beyond the competition.

In today’s market, there are three to four candidates for the best tool on the market – Research In Motion, BoxTone, Conceivium, and Zenprise.

While the reviews have not been good, the BlackBerry Monitoring Service cannot be overlooked, if for nothing else than it’s price tag – FREE. With that said, this solution is not scalable for large environments, despite what the Waterloo Marketing Machine would have you believe (support and technical reps from RIM would likely tell you to look elsewhere). Regardless, for small deployments wanting simple reporting and basic SNMP-based monitoring, this may be the right solution for your company.

The more I looked at Conceivium, both as a very small company of less than 10 employees and as a solutions provider, I have found them to still be caught up in the era in which they first released their montioring product. Even the extras they’re adding to the mobileAnalyzer suite, such as the Business Continuity solution in mobileRED, are very basic. Why pay for a product when you can have something that is equal or better (see above) for free?

Moving on to Zenprise, a company that made a name with monitoring Exchange (granted, I had never heard of them prior to their focus on BlackBerry). They offer a BlackBerry monitoring solution that not only monitors your BlackBerry environment, but also your Exchange and Active Directory environments, as well. Suggested solutions and recommended resolutions are based on knowledge base articles for the most part, although some real world analysis has been added over the last year. In speaking with a former colleague who uses the product, promises of a web-based monitoring console and push-to-fix resolutions have loomed for almost a year… and these should be added ‘very shortly’. I’ll reserve further comments, as some of these rather no-brainer features have been on the roadmap for more than a year and have still not materialized (although I have heard their reporting interface has received a much-needed expansion).

This brings us to BoxTone, my selection for the best monitoring solution for BlackBerry in our current market. This particular sector of the industry really had a noticeable boom following last April’s massive BlackBerry outage (and followed again with a few similar outages over the past year). BoxTone has continued to bring in more and more customers (in addition to more employees at their headquarters in Columbia, Maryland).

BoxTone provides multiple integrated web-based consoles, depending on your role and use of the product. While superior in monitoring capabilities, the surprising benefit we have found has been the Help Desk module. This provides real-time user analysis of issues such as a full mailbox or pending message count or external BES issues, in addition to providing an interface for sending a PIN-to-PIN and email test to the device from an agent running within your own environment. Troubleshooting a BlackBerry issue within our environment has gone from roughly 20-30 minutes per issue to less than 30 seconds in most cases.

As time continues on, BoxTone has been dedicated to improving the product. With the BoxTone database having a wealth of information being stored for health and monitoring purposes, asset management and usage reporting have been added to provide non-health information for compliancy/risk and financial management purposes.

But as I mentioned, my reasons behind selecting BoxTone centered around the web-based console, which is particularly important when nearly 100 people from around the globe will be using the product at the same time. Unfortunately, a client-based installation simply would not have worked. There’s also a mobile console that will give me insight into the health of the environment as well as our users - from my BlackBerry… Top those interface advantages to superior scalability and monitoring functionality, as well as a world-class team of engineers and experts, many of whom I now consider friends, and I feel very confident in my decision in selecting BoxTone.

Written by BlackBerryForums.com Moderator Jibi