This week we had the pleasure of joining with Mark Hale - Cardiff University’s BlackBerry Technical Services Manager - in on a customer roundtable webinar about BlackBerry support best practices. Their BlackBerry and Lotus Notes go-live were in 2008, along with BoxTone for BlackBerry. They are now using SameTime and, recognizing BlackBerry as a university-critical mobile desktop, plan more mobile apps.
The Cardiff University Story with BlackBerry Management and BoxTone
Mark’s story begins: “As I’ve heard from many others, this was literally case of BlackBerry dropped on the desk… with the ‘can you get this working please?’ This was a double whammy with new Notes mail system at the same time.”
Mark quickly realized he needed professional management software to help. “We needed atop down view of the system from BES to mail to carrier to user device… Needed to farm out certain support elements without having to give full access to BES or in depth training… Having experience with looking at BES logs and time constraints of looking at them with no guarantee of even finding the solution… what I found with BoxTone was proactive step-by-step plain English instructions.”
When speaking of issues that impact daily life, Mark stated: “This is an absolute nightmare trying to remember which log goes with which, and trying to work out where the problem is… The nice thing with BoxTone is it pin-points problem straight away….”
“BoxTone’s kind of become an additional member of the staff with me. I login each morning to the dashboard… and it improves collaboration with the Notes Dominos team”
In terms of making the choice, Mark commented during the webinar roundtable: “I found from documentation was simpler and could implement a lot faster than others… with support found no issues at all with time zone differences.”
“With the BoxTone hand-held console, can get the BoxTone alert and fix remotely… without impact to the social life as it were.” Mark went on: “One major thing that was very useful is the setting and resetting of device password. And could get alerts straightaway [when BES was] looking for a particular location and dive in before the user knew about it… really find that very useful…”
In the discussion of proactive alerting, Mark discussed a great personal story: “I can really keep an eye on VIP users, give them a quick call about their problem, such as recently alerted about a VIP. The gentleman thought things were quiet over the weekend and turns out let his device run down completely and switched off the device and the wireless network and even though plugged in, the device did not get back on network. The gentleman was very thankful and commented would have missed a few key appointments on the Monday if not had the call.”
Perhaps the best thing he remarked: “You can become very proactive rather than reactive.”
Share more of Mark’s experience at Cardiff University by clicking here to run on demand.
Tags: Best Practices, BlackBerry, Customer Story, Enterprise, Management & Monitoring
