[Hogie]

The execs where I work are looking at moving to Blackberrys (I recently received one for testing, and they have fallen in love with mine, I have to beat them down sometimes when I walk into their offices because they want to play with it).

Anyway, it was told to me by a data specialist at Nextel (who our corp cellular company is, and my 7510 is serviced by) that if we buy 5 Blackberrys at once and have them activated, we would get them for $249 each and a 5 user license of BES would be provided free of charge also. They say it is the Small business edition. Since we are a small business (I dont see us going over the 6 units we will have), is this worth it? Would you guys be able to give me some hints about it?

[HaTaX]

It's what we started with as well... The only downside is that you cannot buy CALs in a 10 pack like you can with the 20 user BES version..

Other than that it's a great deal, jump on it and go for it! Remember you'll want a SEPERATE pc to do the BES and don't install anything else on it, it'll keep BES headaches to a minimum

[yahtzee]

Both posts are dead on. If there is any potential for growth, consider the 20 user BES.

[Hogie]

We are only planning on using 4 licenses... We are an extremely small company (We have more servers than workstations it seems). All of our work is done via subcontractor linked into our databases (since we do government inspections in 20+ states). I dont know if it will ever grow...

[HaTaX]

Then go for the small business version.. The nice part is that $1500 isn't that much money for a business.. If you use it for 2 years, then it cost you about $50 a month to get into it.. Not so bad from a business perspective.

[headtailgrep]

Wow, i wish Rogers would give us such a deal...

we would jump on that if they would..

instead, my users are looking (and have purchased) alternative devices such as Treos.. and pocket PC's..

we could have standardized on Blackberries, but $1500 for a small handful of users for BES to meld with our Exchange environment is too much for a small company..