RIM Opens BlackBerry Business Cloud Services Public Beta for Microsoft Office 365

We have been hearing about RIM’s collaboration with Microsoft for a RIM hosted cloud BES since BlackBerry World. That product is finally starting to come together in the form of BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365. It is a RIM hosted BlackBerry Management Service for Microsoft Office 365 hosted Exchange. RIM is saying that a number of Fortune 500 customers and several government agencies have been testing the system out for a bit now and it is now ready for public beta. The best part is that BlackBerry Business Cloud Services is available for no extra charge to Microsoft Office 365 Midsized Businesses and Enterprise Plan subscribers and works on both BES and BIS BlackBerry data plans.

You can sign up for the beta at blackberry.com/beta/businesscloud or read more about it at www.blackberry.com/cloudservices and below:

Single login

Powerful and familiar administration

Wireless activation

Support for personal devices

Instant messaging

Data protection

Web-based self-service

User features

For more information, including system requirements, please view the Feature and Technical Overview.

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Rumor: Microsoft Office Suite Coming to the PlayBook?

Now this is a rumor out of left field but I just felt it was interesting enough to mention to start a conversation. As far as I know the BlackBerry PlayBook is the only current tablet on the market that comes with a free office compatible program (Documents to Go). This latest rumor told to N4BB by one of their sources has RIM bringing the Microsoft Office Suite to the BlackBerry PlayBook. The rumor was not sure if it will be the Microsoft Office 365 online apps or simply real apps and everything else seems to be up in the air too.

The question is how this would benefit RIM. Considering how tightly RIM integrates with Microsoft Exchange it might make sense as a quick email solution upgrade for the BlackBerry PlayBook and future BlackBerry devices but then it would not be an exclusively “BlackBerry” email experience. Especially since Microsoft has clearly stated that they think the tablet experience is the full Windows experience unlike their Windows Phone product. Also worth considering is if Microsoft would create apps in their rival Adobe Flash, WebWorks, or the native SDK. On the other hand RIM announced a pretty tight partnership with Microsoft at BlackBerry World with RIM preloading their software and integrating Bing directly into the device.

What do you think?

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