BlackBerry Work Drives is a free application for BlackBerry 10 devices that requires BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10. This app enables BlackBerry customers to remotely access, edit and manage content located on enterprise network drives. Once the network drives are mapped through the Work Drives applications, native applications like File Manager and Documents To Go can be used to manage the network files and folders.

Key Features of the Work Drives app

• Mapping Network Drives: Connect and manage multiple network drives from your BlackBerry 10 smartphone
• File Manager Integration: Access documents and network folders from the File Manager application
• Document Management: Create and edit documents located on network drives using BlackBerry 10 applications like the bundled Documents To Go
• Email: Attach documents to email from shared network drives, and save attachments directly from an email to a shared network drive
• Note: BlackBerry Work Drives is supported on BlackBerry 10 devices provisioned on the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. It requires installation of BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 and BlackBerry Balance and works in the Work perimeter only. It requires BlackBerry 10 OS version 10.0 and above.

Putting BlackBerry Work Drives to Work

Throughout my testing of this capability, I was pleased to be able to edit my team budget via our shared network drive on my BlackBerry 10 smartphone, and upload the revised file back into our team drive – all from the comfort of my couch at home. All I had to do was connect my team’s network drive to my Work Drive application by typing in the network path and my login credentials. The network drive is also saved in my File Manager app, so I only needed to type in the file path once. Once your network drives are mapped through the Work Drives application, native applications like File Manager and Documents To Go kick in to help organize and manage the network files and folders.

Having the ability to access files stored on my various network drives with the tap of an icon from my smartphone means I have the freedom to work on whatever I need to, whenever I need to. Having this capability fully integrated within the BlackBerry 10 platform is an undeniable bonus for those who use network drives in their daily work. I don’t need to go into the office to plug in (although my BlackBerry co-workers are awesome), or carry my laptop around in my already overstuffed work bag to have direct access to my corporate network drive. After speaking with the product team about BlackBerry Work Drives on BlackBerry 10, it’s clear that we are committed to empowering connected BlackBerry customers who we know will embrace the mobility capabilities fully integrated within their BlackBerry 10 smartphone.

Do you use network drives at work? How will you use Work Drives on BlackBerry 10 to be productive on the go? Share in the comments below.

Today I’d like you to meet Sunny Khalsa, a highly mobile and security-conscious worker who’s shared his story with us. Check out the video below to learn about how Sunny uses BlackBerry technology to stay fully functional and fully connected while on the road:

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

With customers that include government agencies, it’s important to have reliable security built into the devices that you use. But security shouldn’t limit functionality – quite the opposite in fact; it should enable it. With trusted BlackBerry security, a whole world of apps and possibilities open up to allow employees to access corporate data while on the move.

I can particularly relate to Sunny’s hotel room ritual – connect a PlayBook tablet to the hotel room TV using an HDMI cable, pair a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, pop open an app like Citrix Receiver or even a remote desktop connection, and get right to it.

How do you use your BlackBerry PlayBook tablet on the road? Share your war stories in the comments below.

Earlier today we announced the 4G LTE™ BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet, which will be available in Canada on August 9th and will become available in other countries and regions around the world in the coming months. With its ultra-fast 4G LTE wireless network support and 1.5 GHz dual core processor, this device delivers an improved performance experience. For those of you who work from home, travel frequently or who are constantly on the road and need wireless connectivity beyond Wi-Fi®, your PlayBook tablet has now arrived.

Experiencing the 4G LTE BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet

When you’re running from one meeting to the next or trying to catch a plane, you need all of your information to be consolidated in one place as it arrives in your inbox. You need to have this information be easy to digest, organize, and filter. This is where the unified inbox of BlackBerry® PlayBook™ OS 2.0 provides serious benefit, with all of your emails, LinkedIn® messages, Facebook® notifications, and Twitter® mentions flowing simply and cleanly into the inbox.

Your flight information, hotel confirmation, and map to the conference center can be stored in the Print To Go® application, where you “printed” them from your PC to the PlayBook tablet as they were received. Information about who you’re meeting with, which may include people you may have never met before, is automatically culled for you from LinkedIn and stored in the Calendar application, giving you context and helping you be better prepared for your meetings.

Sure, hotels and airports generally have Wi-Fi®, but cabs, trains, city streets, and many restaurants are still gaps that need to be filled. For those with Wi-Fi enabled PlayBook tablets, the BlackBerry® Bridge™ app or the Mobile Hotspot feature with BlackBerry® 7.1 OS smartphones can help keep you connected. But with a 4G LTE BlackBerry PlayBook tablet you’ll have broader coverage and faster wireless access on 4G LTE while on the go (when a 4G LTE network is available).

When you’re back in the hotel at the end of your day, take some time for yourself. You’ll find amazing games for the PlayBook tablet on the BlackBerry App World™ storefront. You also shouldn’t have to worry about the mix of corporate and personal data, and neither should your organization; BlackBerry® Balance™ technology helps keep those data stores nicely separated within your PlayBook tablet.

Solving the Challenges of Mobile Device Management for Your Organization

You may have a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy within your organization, perhaps mixed with a few corporately-provisioned smartphones, and even a few special cases within your executive staff. There is little black and white and many shades of gray when it comes to the mobile landscape within many organizations today, both large and small. BlackBerry® Mobile Fusion is our solution to making sense of it all, designed to protect your data, help meet priorities of both employees and IT departments, and ultimately help to lower your total cost of ownership.

BlackBerry Mobile Fusion is designed to allow your organization to manage BlackBerry®, iOS®, and Android™ smartphones and tablets from a single unified interface, leveraging existing BlackBerry technology and new innovations to provide an all-in-one solution from a trusted and experienced provider that’s been delivering Mobile Device Management solutions to enterprise and government customers for more than a decade.

Combined with the BlackBerry® Device Service component of BlackBerry Mobile Fusion, your 4G LTE PlayBook tablet can be securely connected and fully integrated with common corporate mail servers like Microsoft® Exchange®, Lotus® Domino, or Novell® GroupWise®, helping to keep emails, contacts, and calendar appointments synchronized every step of the way so that you won’t miss a beat.

The Experience Doesn’t Stop Here

In future blog posts, we’ll be diving deeper into a fully optimized mobile office experience. Add in a BlackBerry® Mini Keyboard and the Citrix® Receiver for BlackBerry PlayBook tablets, for example, and you’ve got a serious powerhouse of productivity and functionality that can be far easier on the bottom-line (and easier to carry), than laptops or other on-the-go technology. The 4G LTE BlackBerry PlayBook will be pre-loaded with OS 2.0.1, which is also now available for Wi-Fi PlayBook owners as a maintenance update.

The 4G LTE BlackBerry PlayBook tablet is currently available in Canada from Bell, Rogers and TELUS. Get all of the details in our press release, and learn more on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet web site. Data plans are sold separately.

Do you travel often for business? How would you use a 4G LTE BlackBerry PlayBook tablet? Share in the comments below.

* LTE connectivity is currently only available from a limited number of carriers in specific countries. Where LTE is not available, the 4G LTE BlackBerry PlayBook tablet can automatically adjust to connect on HSPA+.

The BlackBerry® Enterprise Applications Showcase is designed to show you how to make a productive mobile enterprise a reality. This one-day virtual event, taking place on May 30th, will allow you to attend live demos, ask questions of experts and explore the exhibition hall, all from the comfort of your own office.

Key partner applications from Citrix, SAP, and Box will be highlighted, and will show you how to fully enable a productive mobile office. Not only will you hear from some great speakers, but you’ll also be able to download relevant information to review and share with your colleagues and decision-makers. The BlackBerry® Resource Center is perfectly suited to host this event, with an interactive conference-style environment that you can explore and take advantage of.

Details

Wednesday May 30th, 2012
10:30am ET – 2:30pm ET
Register now

You can easily register through the BlackBerry Resource Center for your virtual seat at this great event, as well as to see a full agenda. Not a member already? It’s quick and easy to join – register today and start reaping the benefits; there’s a whole lot that the resource center has to offer on an ongoing basis!

Does your organization deploy mobile apps to increase productivity or efficiency? Do you personally use apps this way? Share your experience in the comments.

If you’ve read the previous post – and if you follow me on Twitter® (@LivingLifeBB) – you know that I travel with just a BlackBerry® smartphone and a BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet. That’s right, no laptop!

When it comes to presenting on the road, for the longest time I used the BlackBerry® Presenter and it worked great. Now with my BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, I can do my normal Microsoft® PowerPoint® presentations and much more. This post will cover all of the hardware and software that you will need to be successful in presenting from the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.

Hardware

The best presenters can narrow their success down to one key word: “preparation.” You have to be ready for any scenario that you may be dropped into. At an absolute minimum you will need an HDMI cable, and if you are lucky enough to always get an HDMI-enabled projector or monitor, that’s all you will need. But in an effort to be prepared, I suggest two other items: an HDMI to VGA connector, and an HDMI coupler so you can present to conventional and popular VGA ports. Optionally you can include a DVI to HDMI converter in your kit, but I’ve never run across a projector that didn’t have both VGA and DVI inputs. Lastly, I always bring my portable stand to keep the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet upright so that it is easy to change slides.

Software

You now have the hardware you need for just about any projector or monitor scenario. However, we want to stay away from just doing a simple PowerPoint presentation. I have a few apps that I would recommend you use to add a little more to a presentation. Besides Slideshow To Go®, SketchBook is a heavily used app in presentations, with my primary use for it being white-boarding. What makes this great for presentations is the ability to place a picture in the background and write overtop. This has been particularly helpful in architecture discussions.

I also use the Video application in my presentation as a way to show recorded demos and product videos. It has come in handy on several occasions when people want to see a more detailed perspective.

Extras

The point of this blog post series (and past series) is “no laptops allowed,” and I sure don’t want you to replace a laptop with five pounds of accessories. Besides the three items for presenting, I always carry around the following items: BlackBerry PlayBook tablet charger (doubles as a rapid charger for your BlackBerry smartphone), small USB charger, USB cable, headphones, tablet pen, portable stand, and the BlackBerry Presenter. I know that some of you will ask, “Why would you carry the BlackBerry Presenter when you can present from the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet?” As I said, it’s all about preparation, and you just never know. This is a lot of small loose items to be carrying around, but all of this fits in an easy to carry “Gear Pouch”.

Would you find presenting from the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet more useful than using your laptop? Share your thoughts on ‘mobile presenting’ in the comments below!

Do you remember the days when the only way to access your email was to boot up your desktop and log-in to your corporate intranet? When the phone on your desk was simply a phone devoid of any real features, connected to a completely separate PBX system? When your mobile phone made voice calls, sent text messages and did little else? Things have sure changed since then. The emergence of new technologies is causing a re-evaluation of devices and their relevance in the office. The distinction between laptops, tablets, desk phones, and smartphones is blurring as the capabilities of these devices evolve and converge making collaboration more seamless. The “new office” is wireless, and traditional office devices such as the laptop and desk phone have the potential to ultimately be replaced.

Three technology drivers have made a significant impact on how we work: cloud computing, the convergence of voice and data, and wireless technology.

Cloud computing allows you to access applications that you use on a daily basis over a network rather than from a local computer. With the cloud, software applications are centralized and standardized. Cloud computing typically involves provisioning of dynamically scalable and virtualized resources to ensure reliability and good performance. As network bandwidth has increased along with security, accessing applications from the cloud has become a viable model for many businesses. End-users are freed from their office desktop as long as they have access to the Internet. IT has a much simpler and lower cost way to update applications and perform routine maintenance.

A second driver of change in the workplace is the convergence of voice and data. The traditional desk phone is a voice-only device. Mobile phones used to be primarily voice-only devices. The Internet has changed all that. Circuit-based systems have given way to packet-based systems, allowing voice and data streams to converge, making a voice call indistinguishable from an email – it’s just a bunch of packets. Information such as location and presence status that formerly stayed locked within the telecom network can now be leveraged for richer communications. The implications in the office are tremendous. With a fully IP-based communications system such as the Mitel® Communications Director (MCD) and BlackBerry® Mobile Voice System (BlackBerry MVS), IT departments can deliver a wireless-only solution designed to support all types of workers (desk users, mobile users and users who embody both) and avoid buying multiple devices. With this solution, users can access standard office phone features, such as conferencing, call controls and extension dialing without having to first manually dial into the corporate voice system. Calls on BlackBerry® smartphones can be seamlessly handed off between Wi-Fi® and cellular networks. You can move a call between any device in the user’s Personal Ring Group, and between cellular and Wi-Fi networks. Users have a single number for all devices in their network. Businesses may be able to significantly lower their long distance roaming costs with BlackBerry MVS since it uses optimized call routing and can make calls over Wi-Fi networks.

Wireless technology is another key driver of change in the workplace. Over the last decade there’s been an increasing trend to working remotely, in home offices or satellite offices rather than in a single corporate office. Companies can expand without the need to buy more office space while offering prospective employees the convenience and flexibility afforded by working from home. Tablet computers, like the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet, combined with a BlackBerry smartphone, Bluetooth® keyboard, mouse and headset, are designed to offer a desktop-like experience with optimal portability. BlackBerry® Balance™ technology, software that is designed to let IT departments securely separate corporate and personal data while providing a unified view into both, brings even more simplification since it eliminates the need for employees to have two smartphones.

So how does all of this come together? As an end user, your life is simplified with an all-in-one solution. You no longer have to deal with devices and applications that work only in their own silos. Applications are delivered to you from the cloud, securely over the network and available on your BlackBerry PlayBook tablet or BlackBerry smartphone whether you’re at home, in the office or on the road. In the future, the desk phone experience could be replaced by a BlackBerry smartphone and your desktop computer could be replaced by a BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. When you receive or make calls, Mitel MCD and BlackBerry MVS are designed to provide a seamless experience that looks and feels the same as when you’re at your desk. Get ready, the future is here!

To learn more, register now for the Mitel Discovery Series webinar: Office of the Future with Mitel and BlackBerry. The webinar takes place on Tuesday, June 28th at 1:00pm EDT.

- Bill Gough, Director, Unified Communications Partner Alliances