[tobyw]

Dear All,

I am posting here for a bit of an advice about what to do regarding a BES installation. For the past couple of years we have run BES Express for a single user. We are now in the position of renewing or changing our mobile contract and it seems there will be another BB user (possibly up to three more, depending on cost).

The options are therefore to 'upgrade' to BES Small Business (with the appropriate number of CALs) or to change to BES Professional (again with the required no of CALs). I am currently thinking that BES Professional might be the most simple solution. I would continue to run this on a dedicated server.

I gather that the only downside would be that we couldn't run custom MDS apps, but that is not an issue and almost certainly will not be for the foreseeable future.

Can anyone see a problem with this? Any other downsides with Professional? Any upsides to going with Small Business?

Thanks for any wise words here.

[knottyrope]

15 vs 30 users and MDS.
Thats about it.

I would stay with the smaller one since you are not at 15 users and the interface will not change. BPS has a different interface that confused me for a bit then we went to enterprise and got confused again. LOL

[Flare3]

I would go SBE, because the upgrade to BPS is free from SBE. It is my understanding that you can't go the other way. This gives you the best functionality, while maintaining all your options.

Now having said that. You already have your SRP ID, so all you need to add is the CAL. This makes the cost of both options basically the same, in fact I think SBE is then cheaper... (but not positive on that one)

[DavidAdams]

SBE does Enterprise Messenger which BPS doesn't. May or may not be of value, for us it was at the time. We've gone to full BES now so a sort of moot point, but at the time the ability to run Sametime was important.

[tobyw]

Belated thanks to you both for the input (been away for a few weeks).

David - I don't think we'd need/use Enterprise Messenger, but it is useful to know that we could if using SBE.

All in, I think we may go to Professional. The reasoning is that I will probably have to flatten the server and re-install stuff anyway. It may also be the case that in the future I'm not going to be maintaining it and with this in mind Professional might be better for whoever takes over.

[knottyrope]

You dont have to flatten it. Its like doing a service pack to upgrade to BPS.