When marketing fails to deliver

Well it has been a while since I last blogged and that is because I have just been so manic, busy beyond belief, mostly because of work. It has been eventful, firstly with new deployments eating most weekends as well as technical challenges.

Lately I have been battling with Blackberry encryption. In the past this was a straight forward setup with their old version of BES Professional so I thought I would try out the new version BES Express. According to the marketing blurb on RIM’s website it leads you to believe their new freeby product Blackberry Enterprise Server Express 5 supports PGP.
This link http://na.blackberry.com/eng/services/business/server/express/features.jsp#tab_tab_security

and has the following info:

“Flexible security architecture
For implementations requiring additional security, PGP®, S/MIME and PGP/MIME are also supported. Over 35 IT policies further support the needs of your business by providing adjustable security levels and capabilities that include the following:
• Impose a device lock-down
• Wipe data from a lost or stolen device
• Wirelessly enforce security settings such as Bluetooth® lockout”

Having read the bit that says “flexible security architecture for implementations requiring additional security, PGP, S/MIME and PGP/MIME are also supported” I thought bingo! This should be quick and easy to configure however after two weeks of pulling my hair out and eventually deciding to bite the bullet, admit defeat and pay for Blackberry support, they have come back to say, “errrr actually it doesn’t support PGP”.

This has been a bit of a blow for me seeing as I had recently deployed a new BES Express server for our business based on this info, predominantly to get the new features such as HTML mail. Alas, when it came down to it I could not find the option to configure PGP in the server and so it turns out neither could their support team.

I guess the bottom line is that you can’t always believe what you read! It is a shame that this little exercise has cost me a support ticket and also two weeks of my time on and off trying to sort this out.