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Does anyone know of an easy way to determine the status of the BlackBerry network, outside of observing that your BlackBerry isn't working anymore or receiving email alerts from RIM?

Some of our users were affected by an outage on Sunday, and we'd like to have a way for our helpdesk staff to quickly determine whether there is an issue with RIM, or an issue with our internal BES or mail system. We do get service advisories from RIM via email, receiving email alerts when your BlackBerry isn't working can be a challenge. :)

7 Answers 7

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The only product I've ever found to do this is BoxTone.

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    BoxTone looks like the only real answer. Unfortunately it also costs lots of real money. :) Jun 26, 2009 at 13:57
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This is a community-based list so it's not a trouble-shooting tool or a definitive availability notice but it may be useful:

http://www.dataoutages.com/mailman/listinfo/bb-outage

Dan

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    The more I learn about BlackBerry, the more I'm puzzled by its success. How do you manage to build a communications solution with a huge single point of failure, and get away with minimally documenting scheduled and unscheduled outages? Jun 24, 2009 at 19:41
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    You could say the same thing about twitter.
    – Joseph
    Jun 24, 2009 at 20:02
  • heh. We've quietly wondered the same but I believe the usefulness of the messaging integration + the popularity with sales forces and management accounts for a lot of it. What's the term? Executive engagement? ;)
    – damorg
    Jun 24, 2009 at 20:30
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    the big difference, of course, between twitter and RIM is that tweets are free. So are farts. :)
    – Guamaniac
    Jun 27, 2009 at 16:05
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    I believe there is still just a single Relay set up in Waterloo that almost all North American BB traffic gets routed through.
    – Ophidian
    Nov 13, 2009 at 13:29
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The new BES 5.0 has a decent included monitoring service you can install seperate from the BES itself to monitor everything.

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  • The BES 5 SDK also has some webservice API's that will let you ping out to individual handhelds to verify that they are reachable. IIRC, this is part of the component process that Boxton automates.
    – Ophidian
    Nov 13, 2009 at 13:26
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BoxTone prices start at around $10K for the BlackBerry Essentials monitoring solution and can support up to 500 devices. Might be all that's needed.

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Airwatch is a great solution and very cost effective.

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Automate the following process

1) Send an email to a blackberry user with the following subject line: <$Confirm,RemoveOnDelivery,SuppressSaveInSentItems> 2) You will get a confirmation delivery provided the following are true:

Connectivity from Email > BES > Handheld is operational Blackberry user is not out of reception.

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If you purchase a premier support contract with RIM, then they will actually contact you/your support group and inform you of issues as they happen.

This is a feature of a premier support contract (very expensive). It used to be available to T1 or T2 subscribers. The names of the contracts have changed, so you will have to contact your sales rep to find the most cost effective one for you

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