There was great news yesterday for anyone using a Blackberry in their business. Research in Motion (RIM) announced new software that will allow small businesses to wirelessly sync their calendar, contacts and email for free.

Here’s the quick background on Blackberry software. Many people who use Blackberrys for their business sync them by physically plugging them into their computer – an annoying and time-wasting exercise. In order to wirelessly sync emails, contacts and calendar from Outlook, businesses had to buy Blackberry Enterprise Server, which cost about $4,000 for a 20-employee business.

This was simply too expensive for most small businesses. For a while, we found a more cost effective way to do this where we were installing Blackberry Professional Software, which only cost $100 per user. RIM has stopped updating that software and it doesn’t have many of the new features available.

Thankfully, competition has led to a new world for small business Blackberry users. RIM announced yesterday it is releasing Blackberry Enterprise Server Express “soon” and it will be available for free.

This software has all of the important elements for Blackberry and we’re quite excited about it. We’ll be suggesting all of our clients with Microsoft Exchange upgrade to it.

Here are some benefits of it (taken from the RIM website):

• Remote File Access - Users can find local and remote files, and open, view, save, or email JPEG, Adobe® PDF, Microsoft® Word, Microsoft® Excel® and Microsoft® PowerPoint® files directly from their BlackBerry® smartphone.
• Ability to download, edit, save and attach documents - Users can edit and save changes to Microsoft® Word and Microsoft® PowerPoint® files, then send them as email attachments to colleagues and customers while on the go.
• Native file attachments - Users can download and save full-size email attachments in their native file formats
• Increased IT administration functionality and security
• Contact sync – Contact information on users’ BlackBerry smartphones automatically stays up-to-date with the information on their computers.
• Address lookup – Users can look up colleagues in the corporate address book from their smartphone.
• Synchronization of multiple contact folders and more – Users can synchronize multiple contact folders, personal distribution lists and public/shared folders to their smartphone.

The last bullet is one of the most important elements that I know at least a couple of our clients will be very happy about. Until now, Blackberrys haven’t been able to effectively sync a shared company contact list AND your personal contact list – it’s been one or the other. Now they can do both.

We will let everyone know when the software is available. We plan to test it at our office first and then, provided we’re happy with it, we’ll roll it out to our clients.

As an aside, if you’re wondering why wirelessly syncing your Blackberry is important, here are a couple scenarios to explain it. If someone in your office updates your calendar while you’re out at a meeting, your Blackberry calendar will update immediately.

Also, if you read an email on your Blackberry, it will show up as read (i.e. not bolded) in your inbox, allowing you to better manage your email.

Give us a call if you need more explanation or detail on the benefits of this.