BlackBerry vs. Exchange: The best for your business

User profiles
How do these email solutions fit into your usage patterns?

The Large Company
Deciding which is best for a large company is like choosing if blue or yellow is the nicest colour. It completely depends on what type of business requires a wireless email solution, how the solutions on offer cost in and crucially how much efficiency Blackberry or MS Exchange can bring to a company and it’s employees.

There is little doubt that mobilising employees brings huge benefits to the corporate world, and that these are the two dominating services at this time. Ultimately they achieve very similar goals and the way in which they are implemented can also be similar, or confusingly vastly different.

It is likely that the buying decision will be based on the current infrastructure and how well a new wireless email solution can be integrated into existing hardware and software. If you already use Exchange then Windows Mobile or Nokia handsets might be the preferred solution; if not, then the appeal might lie in the simpler setup and admin of BlackBerry.

The Individual / Small Business
We have demonstrated that choosing between these two solutions requires lots of analysis for the most expert of IT Administrators, so how will the one man band or small company decide what to choose?

It is almost a catch22 situation in that MS Exchange is likely to appear more familiar to employees with some technical knowledge, but BES is actually quicker to learn. Pricing for smaller companies will inevitably be less differentiated than on a larger scale so the choice will again come down to how well a new solution will fit into the current infrastructure.

Conclusion
The only way to truly demonstrate the differences between Blackberry and MS Exchange would require a detailed analysis of every aspect of the systems, but that would still not answer all of the questions.

The main points to take away are that both systems are now mature enough to offer a highly reliable and efficient service which, if set up correctly, will provide almost 100% uptime.

Many Blackberry solutions will require traffic to be fed over RIM’s own servers and this should be considered, but despite the occasional blip last year the Blackberry system has more than proved itself capable of benefiting businesses small and large for many years now.

The same can be said of MS Exchange so the good news is that whatever you choose, the experience should be a positive one.

Article originally appeared in Smartphone & PDA Essentials magazine. Words by Shaun McGill.

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