In preparation for WES2009, we blogged about ‘A Practical Strategy for Migrating to BES 5.0 Part I’ and then Part II where we talked about the things an organization should do to ensure the most seamless & painless upgrade/migration to BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) 5.0. The focus, of course, was on how to do the migration while maintaining the best possible user experience and the generating the fewest incidents & shortest help desk calls possible.
Research In Motion recently published an article entitled ‘Upgrading to BlackBerry Enterprise Server v5.0: The Five Stages to Success’ which complements our original posting nicely. The focus of RIM’s article is how to evaluate BES 5.0 for your organization and how to ensure that the final solution meets the needs of the organization and at the same time leverages the Enterprise-class features of the product. Five distinct upgrade preparation stages were highlighted: evaluation, readiness, solution design, planning, and implementation.
What’s interesting is that RIM points to the readiness phase as the part of the project where the needs of the organization are analyzed to see if they will be met by the BES 5.0 deployment. For most BES administrators, however, the readiness assessment really deals with whether the environment is ready: whether the components of the environment (servers, devices, BlackBerry Device Software versions and more) are at the correct status/level for the upgrade. For any organization beginning a BES 5.0 upgrade, the hard work done in advance during this readiness phase can be started now and will reduce the work performed during the upgrade/migration.
Based on our many recent client conversations, we wanted to share that both postings are worth reading and the steps outlined in each should be combined into a single project and operations plan for every BES 5.0 upgrade. Here they are together:
- A Practical Strategy for Migrating to BES 5.0
- Upgrading to BlackBerry Enterprise Server v5.0: The Five Stages to Success
John Wargo and Mitch Berk
BoxTone
Tags: Add new tag, Best Practices, BlackBerry, Management & Monitoring, release
