(Shameless self-disclaimer: I’m a file hoarder of the worst sort. PowerPoint presentations on the enterprise road map from 2007? Still got ‘em. Press release from BlackBerry Pearl smartphone launch? In my media kit folder. Photos from my high school Euro-trip? Purple hair…what was I thinking?!)

Luckily for me, with BlackBerry 10, I now have access to my digital underworld of perfectly organized online file folders, spanning the far depths of my carefully curated folder collection.

Now that BlackBerry 10 has launched, we can officially spill the beans. Some of our favorite online file management and collaboration tools come not just pre-loaded, but deeply integrated into the BlackBerry 10 platform! With the graceful swipe of a fingertip, all BlackBerry 10 smartphone customers can now easily flow on over to a wide array of well-known and secure cloud storage and collaboration tools – Box and DropBox in particular.

With these tools, you can attach files from the cloud straight from the BlackBerry Hub, without needing to switch apps or leave your “compose” screen. There’s also the ability to press the “share” button (ie. when viewing a photo, file or video), and add that file directly into your cloud storage space. Using BlackBerry Balance, there is also the ability to see files from both your personal and work profile, if your work space is unlocked.

We’ve also designed it so that when you’re looking at content with File Manager, or when opening documents in Documents To Go, you can browse all of your cloud accounts too. Even your “recently used documents” include your latest cloud files!

For those who’ve already jumped on the cloud storage bandwagon – virtual high five! Points to you for your file-saving and sharing prowess. For those who have yet to experience the time-saving benefits, you are definitely going to appreciate why these tools have become so popular with the IT and business crowd. Using cloud storage apps like Box and DropBox means you can easily save, share and store files, all safely and securely in your own personal online file storage space. These tools allow you to virtually share your folders with friends, colleagues and business partners – no more need to exchange an old fashioned USB stick or be the culprit of sending the 20MB PowerPoint attachment that clogs up everyone’s inbox (queue collective sigh of relief).

At BlackBerry, we know our customers are powerful multi-taskers, always on the go with places to be and people to see. That’s why integrating cloud-based file sharing tools directly into our BlackBerry 10 platform was an easy decision. When drafting an email on your BlackBerry smartphone, having the ability to quickly flow over to your file management center and choose your file storage app of choice, is not only super convenient – but also a quick way to get stuff done. Through my testing of the file storage and sharing capabilities, I also quickly figured out that when drafting an email or document, all you have to do is click the attachment icon to add attachments – this happens instantly – straight from the cloud! Built on a core BlackBerry 10 cornerstone of removing the need for the old in-and-out paradigm, there was no need to switch between my file storage app and my email to add the attachment. Everything I needed to access to add my attachment was all at my fingertips by tapping the attachment icon!

I also prefer to travel without my laptop. With BlackBerry 10, I use cloud storage to simplify my life. By bringing my photos, docs, PowerPoints, spreadsheets and videos anywhere I go with my BlackBerry 10 smartphone, I can easily share my files wherever I am in the world. Last week, I was in a meeting and didn’t even need to bring my laptop to present a blog story idea to my colleagues. I was able to pull up my PowerPoint presentation via my cloud storage app of choice on my BlackBerry 10 smartphone. I quickly plugged in my micro HDMI cable, opened my cloud storage app and presented to everyone on our office projection screen – all from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.

The possibilities are endless for staying organized with BlackBerry 10.

Have you tried out any of the file management apps mentioned in this blog post? If so, how has the experience been? Let me know by commenting below!

In the business industry, things are always changing. In order to keep up with emerging trends and industry news, I do a lot of reading. A couple of months ago, Maribel Lopez of Lopez Research published a study titled “Mobile, Social and Cloud Transform Business and IT” addressing how these three major technology trends are changing business today.

Lopez Research estimates that there will be more than 30 billion connected mobile devices and 6 billion mobile internet users by 2020. As industries like consumer electronics and automotive include mobile sensors in virtually all products, many of the 6 billion mobile Internet users will use mobile technologies as their only or primary connection to the Internet.

Mobility will transform business in four ways:

• Connecting Phones, Tablets and the “Internet of Things”: Companies will need to adapt current network connectivity models and plan for a substantial rise in real-time information. Additionally, companies will need to prepare for various interaction models, including people to people, people to things, and machine to machine. Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solutions like BlackBerry® Mobile Fusion will allow organizations to manage company and/or employee-owned devices on multiple platforms and reduce the risk of lost or stolen devices.
• Rebuilding Business Processes to Work in a Mobile World: Because mobility-optimized systems are task oriented, companies will need to change how applications and processes are created. Applications will need to be able to deliver sensory information and be device-aware, location-aware, and network/cloud-aware.
• Creating Portable Services: As more people begin to carry multiple mobile devices, content and services will also be readily available at any location. Applications like BlackBerry® Bridge allow you to pair your BlackBerry® smartphone with a BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet to access documents, browsing, emails, messagin,g and photos. Also, the Citrix Receiver app allows users to access a virtual desktop with the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.
• Supporting Multiple Personas Per Individual: In the past, enterprise features were locked to a specific device, but as mobility evolves, technology like BlackBerry® Balance™ will enable IT to separate corporate and personal data — essential to supporting a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) environment. By separating personal data and applications from corporate data and applications, both the employee’s information and the organization’s information will remain private.

While mobility will create new opportunities for businesses, it also opens up potential security and management risks in addition to “business-process challenges.” As these technologies continue to evolve and embed themselves more deeply in our everyday lives, businesses must prepare to adapt to the changes they will bring. In order to address these risks and challenges, businesses must create a mobile strategy that addresses security and management and support of multiple device operating systems. Lopez research suggests a three-step plan to prepare for the changes mobile brings:

For more about how mobility will transform business and what organizations should do to prepare for the change, read the study: “Mobile, Social and Cloud Transform Business and IT”

Has your organization begun to see any of these changes from Mobile, Social and Cloud technologies? What strategies will you be adopting to confront the transformation?

As Thorsten Heins stated during the last quarterly earnings call, RIM remains committed to our enterprise customers. We’re designing a tightly focused and dedicated plan to continue to deliver solutions that are scalable, secure, and tailored to specific business needs. In an exciting announcement earlier today, Robin stated that by next year’s BlackBerry World, BlackBerry Mobile Fusion will be offered on-site as it is now, as a hosted and managed solution through partners, or completely in the cloud. Couple this with the evolving concept of a mobile office powered by BlackBerry 10, and the future is certainly bright for enterprise mobility.

Check out the videos below to hear it straight from Robin and Alan, and share what you’re most excited about in the comments below!

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

We’re super excited about this year’s BlackBerry World™ – plans are well underway and we can’t wait for May 1st, 2012. Registration is now officially open, so head over to www.blackberryworld.com and reserve your spot ASAP.

BlackBerry World is the largest BlackBerry® conference of the year where the community of BlackBerry users, partners, business leaders, and IT decision makers meet to learn of the latest innovations, upcoming BlackBerry products and services, mobile strategy, and to check out live demonstrations. The conference is also a fantastic networking opportunity to meet with individuals in similar roles facing similar challenges and industry trends.

BlackBerry World, May 1-3, 2012 in Orlando, Florida
Register here

What can you expect to dig into this year?

• BlackBerry® Mobile Fusion – the future of device management in the enterprise
• Looking ahead to BlackBerry® 10
• BlackBerry Business Cloud Services: Moving your infrastructure forward
• …and much more! Stay tuned for details on sessions and the keynote address

Stay up to date on all of the latest info by keeping an eye on www.blackberryworld.com, where you can sign up for updates. Leading up to May 1st (and on site at the event), you can follow @BlackBerry4Biz on Twitter® as well as coming back to the Inside BlackBerry for Business Blog, and join the discussion on LinkedIn® to get excited and keep tabs on all of the action.

Did you attend BlackBerry World 2011? What was your favorite part of the conference? Share in the comments.

Marcy, our SMB expert and author of the “SMB Cloud Series” (be sure to check out her posts on Cloud Storage, The Mobile Web, and Accounting in the Cloud – stay tuned for more in the series!) steered the ship on the below video outlining how BlackBerry can help SMB’s stay connected to the social web.

[YouTube link for mobile viewing]

I won’t get into pages and pages of how businesses can use social media to drive value, but know that there is activity in the social media space around customer relationship management, content and engagement for brand awareness, a wide reach for communication, customer service and support, recruitment, and market insights for uses like product or service development (to name a few). Feel free to check out a whitepaper on Mobile Social Networking via Computerworld.

A Million Things to Do

Running a small or medium sized business clearly means taking on a variety of roles as an individual, and you may not yet be at the point where you can bring in a few social media managers, community managers, copywriters, and platform experts. For you (or whoever is heading up your social initiatives), staying connected and keeping tabs on multiple social channels can prove to be challenging and time-consuming. This is where we can help! BlackBerry software and operating systems on smartphones and tablets have become progressively social-friendly, and are now at the point where they can serve as your hub of communications to not only monitor, but also actively engage in social activities in pursuit of your business goals.

Consolidate your social media management into one place and take it with you on the go with social applications, including BlackBerry Social Feeds and a unified inbox, available for BlackBerry devices. Don’t forget to stay looped into our very own BlackBerry social communities too!

How does your business use social media? Share in the comments below.

This is the third entry in our small and medium sized businesses (SMB) Cloud blog post series (check out part 1 on cloud storage and part 2 on the cloud and mobile web if you haven’t already!), and an opportunity to tell you about a great offer from two key players in the mobile accounting space.

What’s more important to your business than getting paid, and what’s better than getting paid fast? An endless stream of payments, I suppose, but perhaps we could look at solutions for that in future posts. In the meantime, the ability to know where your business stands – where it is on orders placed, invoices sent and paid, or stock levels from anywhere at any time – can give you a competitive advantage. It allows you to better manage cash flow, develop new business opportunities and accurately plan into the future.

Whether you are still relying on older accounting software to keep your finances in order or you have moved on to more ‘robust’ products, being able to invoice a customer as soon as the product or service has been delivered, thereby speeding up the payment cycle, can only help your bottom line.

To that end, one of the leaders in online invoicing, FreshBooks, and their mobile app partner ReportAway!® have got a handy solution for you. Here’s some info on what you can expect with ReportAway! for FreshBooks:

ReportAway! is a FreshBooks application for BlackBerry® smartphones that allows you to create invoices and track time to your FreshBooks account wherever you are. From ReportAway!, you can create invoices to your FreshBooks account, which can be sent out immediately to your clients. It also allows you to enter payments, create estimates, track time to your projects, and add expenses while on the go. There is also a handy mileage calculator for automobile expense entries.

ReportAway! integrates with native BlackBerry smartphone Phone, Contacts, Calendar and Task applications. You can also import BlackBerry device phone logs, calendar events, or tasks as time into FreshBooks, as well as importing BlackBerry contacts as FreshBooks clients.

FreshBooks, and their mobile app partner ReportAway! have come together to create a great offer for you to try out their cloud based accounting solutions. Here are the basics:

If you are new to both FreshBooks and ReportAway!, you can download ReportAway! for Freshbooks on the BlackBerry App World™ storefront for free (regularly $19.99 USD) until December 15th, 2011. If you are new to ReportAway! and already have a FreshBooks account, you can try out ReportAway! for 30 days for free.

You may also be entered to win a BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet! For full details on the offer and promotion, check out the FreshBooks blog post.

Why not give it a try? Let us know what you think of the app in the comments.

Discussions about how Cloud computing and services can drive impact for cost management and solution delivery played a key part at our recent BlackBerry® Innovation Forum in Amsterdam, and these topics will also be a major focus for our remaining events across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The BlackBerry platform has a heritage in the cloud, operating in it for nearly 12 years with a proven system for security and data protection. (The “Cloud” means different things to different users, but includes options such as web-based applications, such as email, through to data storage and data farms.)

Why cloud computing?

The Cloud is about information management, and companies naturally want to give employees access to information in the easiest and most cost efficient way. Using the Cloud can be one of the best solutions for information management for a number of reasons:

1. For companies who don’t want the hassle of IT issues, they can purchase Cloud computing solutions to help keep IT costs low as the initial cost barrier of entry is generally low.
2. Pricing for Cloud computing can include options to only pay for what you have used. There is a clear understanding of what services you pay for to help forecast operating expenditures.
3. Cloud computing is scalable and flexible. It gives you the ability to adjust your services for season peaks and troughs to give you a totally customizable service that doesn’t require long-term capital commitments. For large Enterprise businesses, this can save costs by way of outsourcing services to the Cloud.

BlackBerry Management Centre is a service that allows businesses to centrally manage their devices and provide email support from all major web browsers, simply and effectively without the need for specialist skills or IT systems support, all for free. BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365 allows organizations to realize the benefits of using Microsoft Office 365, such as Microsoft® Office and Microsoft Exchange email through their BlackBerry smartphones – and all through the Cloud. You can learn more about these innovations and how they can benefit your business by joining the conversations at our BlackBerry Innovation Forum events or via @BBEMEABusiness using the hashtag #BIF11.

Cloud computing based solutions continue to be an increasingly important part of IT strategies. Regardless of where your organization is at today, they’ll want to start thinking about their migration plans and taking time to work out a robust transition schedule that minimizes any business disruptions. Additionally when you think about email and other facets of the Microsoft Office 365 suite, consider the non-communication uses of email. Many companies use email for invoice routing, updating CRM systems through formatted shortcodes, and the like. What are those business needs? How will they be impacted? How could these workflows benefit, not only from a cloud based alternative, but also from being made mobile?

Now, if you’re a customer on a pre-existing Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) solution, BlackBerry smartphones will continue to be supported for existing BPOS Customers until you transition to Microsoft Office 365. You can continue using your BlackBerry devices with existing Microsoft service for Exchange Online with no discontinuation of service until your transition. The previous $10/month fee was removed in March, so connecting your BlackBerry device to your Microsoft solution is free!

For new Microsoft Office 365 customers, simply sign up for a trial or full subscription of Microsoft Office 365 and you will have the option to add BlackBerry smartphone connectivity through the BlackBerry Business Cloud Service offering within the Microsoft Office 365 portal. Once you have agreed to the BlackBerry Cloud Service Terms and Conditions you will be able to provision and manage BlackBerry smartphones within your organization.

We encourage you to take advantage of this offer and register your organization for the BlackBerry Business Cloud Service Beta. This program will allow organizations to get a feel for the service offering and see how it fits with their business needs. Not only will this help to put you ahead of your peers, but the feedback you provide will help us continue to improve the product and ensure it meets your specific needs moving forward.

So, what are you waiting for? Get started with your organization’s Beta now!

This product has been in the works for some time. Earlier this year, we announced an agreement with Microsoft to develop a cloud-based service to deliver Microsoft Office 365 content to BlackBerry smartphones. Following up on that, we shared our overall cloud strategy with customers throughout BlackBerry World™ 2011. And over the past several months, we’ve been fortunate to work with a number of customers who participated in an early access program to help us develop our BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365 product – a major milestone in delivering cloud benefits for our customers!

BlackBerry Business Cloud Services is designed to deliver a simple and affordable way for companies to manage BlackBerry smartphones with Microsoft Office 365. Available at no additional charge to Microsoft Office 365 subscribers, this secure service, hosted by Research In Motion® (RIM®), is designed to directly link Microsoft® Exchange Online with BlackBerry smartphones to offer reliable, mobile access to synchronized email, calendar, contacts, tasks and memo pads.

While end users will see this as a great mobile solution for accessing their business information when on the go, from an IT perspective, there’s a lot more going on under the covers. As part of an overall BlackBerry solution, IT organizations can benefit from enterprise-oriented elements including:

• Separation of individual/corporate data: BlackBerry® Balance™ technology is designed to present a unified view of work and personal content on BlackBerry smartphones connected to an organization’s BlackBerry® Enterprise Server or BlackBerry® Enterprise Server Express while keeping content separate and secure behind the scenes – minimizing both corporate security and personal privacy issues.
• Easy management: IT administrators have access to a web-based console to provision, manage and secure BlackBerry smartphones from almost anywhere. The intuitive, web-based interface is designed to provide the tools administrators need to perform common tasks like password reset or to find/lock/wipe lost devices, and so on.
• End user self-service: Individuals have access to online tools for basic self-service functions. Using an integrated single sign-on between Microsoft Office 365 and BlackBerry Business Cloud Services, end users have online self-service options that help make managing devices more efficient, including the ability to reset a device password or remotely lock/wipe a device in the event of loss or theft.
• Evergreen™ software: Since BlackBerry Business Cloud Services are hosted by RIM, they are always up to date. We ensure that you benefit from the latest version of BlackBerry software, eliminating the need for IT to manually execute upgrades. This helps to reduce organizational labor and hardware costs.

Are you on the cloud? Have you accessed any beta products from RIM for your organization? Now’s your chance!

Cloud, cloud, cloud – it’s all about the cloud! In fact, we have just launched a cloud solution to help Small and Medium sized businesses better manage their BlackBerry® devices – the free BlackBerry Management Center. But what does all of this cloud talk really mean to businesses like yours? My guess is that you use cloud solutions every day – maybe you have been for years – but just haven’t necessarily been referring to them as ‘cloud’. Does your business use webmail? Cloud. What about an integrated voice mail system accessed from your mobile device? Cloud. Online payment services, again – cloud. Internet banking, you got it – cloud. The list goes on.

We thought it might be good to start some dialogue around the concept of ‘cloud’ and what it means to you in your work life. We are open to ideas (send them in or use the comments!) but ‘cloud storage’ seemed like a good place to start.*

Businesses, regardless of size or focus, need to have a secure, reliable and easily accessible storage solution for all of their important data. Oftentimes this information needs to be stored centrally so that groups of people, both internal and external to your company, can access them. This is probably even more relevant in today’s “total mobility and wireless work from anywhere at any time-ability.” (I’m thinking that I will coin that phrase!)
There are loads of solutions out there today to meet these needs, from complex backup systems to lightweight, software-as-a-service (SaaS) offers. Given this post focuses on the ‘Cloud and Small Business,’ I thought I would run through a great new ‘sign up and go’ service with a particularly good offer for BlackBerry users.

Box.net is a storage, collaboration, and workflow tool geared towards small business needs. Box.net is designed to allow businesses to share files and get necessary approvals from clients. They can access and check the status of the data from virtually anywhere their day takes them, as well as assign tasks and add comments as needed. Administrative controls are easy to assign and can be done on the fly.

For a limited time, Box.net is offering 50GB of storage free (a value of $20/month!) to BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet owners. Download the Box.net application for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet between September 7, 2011 and December 31, 2011 and sign in or register to receive 50 GB free storage Make sure that you don’t miss out! To check out all of the details and take advantage of this promotion, head over to www.box.net/playbook. Once you’re up and running with a box.net account and app on your BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, I think you can consider yourself an official user of ‘the cloud’.

Do you currently use a cloud storage solution at your company? Beyond straight storage, what do you do with them?

* By posting a comment below you acknowledge that you have read and accept these terms and conditions and that any ideas you post will be the property of RIM in accordance with these terms and conditions.