Hosted Ms Exchange With Ais Blackberry

[pj123]

Some advice would be welcome.

My wife currently has an AIS contract and would like to purchase a Blackberry for her business.

Her MS Exchange business email is hosted by a UK company, cobweb.com, which has been very reliable and good value at £3.00 per month per account.

Cobweb offers what they call "Exchanged Blackberry Enterprise" for an extra £7.00 per month.

I am unsure whether Cobweb's Exchanged Blackberry Enterprise would connect with AIS's Blackberry service. Cobweb are a UK company and are not able to advise me how their service would work on a Blackberry in Thailand on a Thai sim.

I think I have three options.

1. Avoid the AIS Blackberry service altogether: buy an unlocked Blackberry and just rely on Cobweb's Exchanged Blackberry Enterprise on a regular AIS dataplan. Cost would be £84 per year plus dataplan.

2. Use the AIS Blackberry email service with Cobweb's Hosted Exchange (and avoid paying for Cobweb's Exchanged Blackberry Enterprise). I'm unclear on which AIS Blackberry package to use.

3. Use third party software, Notifysync, to access Cobweb's Hosted Exchange via Activesync. As with Option 2, use an unlocked Blackberry and AIS data plan. Avoid both Cobweb's and AIS's Blackberry services. £78 for the first year, then £20 after that, plus dataplan.

What is important is that emails sent from the Blackberry are immediately synced with the MS Exchange account. I also like the idea of not being locked into AIS so if we go abroad we can just swap the sim for a local sim.

Please note that advice to stop using MS Exchange and move to google apps or similar advice is not helpful. My wife likes Cobweb, MS Outlook and Blackberry. Thanks!

[2008bangkok]

First and foremost you must use Exchange as it makes having a BB worth while with the extra syncing benefits

The location of the Exchange server should not matter, if it is in Thailand or whether it is UK or USA should not be a problem..

If it is an actual BES subscription then it is worth paying the 7 quid a month for becasue the advantage of BES is immediate pushed email, contacts/calendar/tasks/notes sync,, its good.

Whatever way you look at it you will need to have a Blackberry plan of some sort otherwise you will not be able to use the Blackberry services like BBM or browsing and it could also limit the ability to actually collect email , plus you are unlikely to get a normal data plan if they know you are on Blackberry, ontop of that sometimes if you wish to access BES the phone comapny also want extra for that so try using enterprise activation app, for instance DTAC want about 1500 baht a month to use your BES account

What i do on my phone is I use True, they charge me 350 baht a month(on contract, i belive AIS charge around 750) for all BIS services then i downloaded the enterpirse actiavation from appworld http://bit.ly/activatebes then as im the IT guy anyway I set a BES p/w then entered that and voila it was done.

In a nutshell here it is, with a normal Blackberry Internet Service you will have no problem connecting with Exchange at no extra cost, but this will only sync email and nothing else

If you pay for Blackberry Internet Service and then pay Cobweb for there BES plan then you should be able to sync email/contacts/calendar/tasks/notes between Outlook and BB over the air

So the question is does your wife want these extra syncing features if so they pay for BES, if she is happy with just email syncing then no need for BES plan

Hope this helps

[jybkk]

As far as I understand, Blackbery manage their own push/sync system. As long as an operator is willing to provide Blackberry service, they have to let the user access to this BB system and therefore any mail, contact etc... will be available to anyone anywhere connected to a BB service (there might be exceptions in some countries where governments forced BB to move the servers within the country to be subject to filtering, but that's not the case of Thailand).

What Cobweb seems to do is simply sync their service with BB system. On the other side, AIS and their BB offer give you access to BB system, and therefore to the whole data that was synced by Cobweb.

I don't think AIS would have a way to offer a "specific" set of Blackberry services. However, The Blackberry handset you purchase with AIS might be able to use only AIS SIM so if you travel, you'll have to pay for roaming charges (for your calls, BB connection, internet...) and AIS might not be the cheapest.

[pj123]

First and foremost you must use Exchange as it makes having a BB worth while with the extra syncing benefits

The location of the Exchange server should not matter, if it is in Thailand or whether it is UK or USA should not be a problem..

If it is an actual BES subscription then it is worth paying the 7 quid a month for becasue the advantage of BES is immediate pushed email, contacts/calendar/tasks/notes sync,, its good.

Whatever way you look at it you will need to have a Blackberry plan of some sort otherwise you will not be able to use the Blackberry services like BBM or browsing and it could also limit the ability to actually collect email , plus you are unlikely to get a normal data plan if they know you are on Blackberry, ontop of that sometimes if you wish to access BES the phone comapny also want extra for that so try using enterprise activation app, for instance DTAC want about 1500 baht a month to use your BES account

What i do on my phone is I use True, they charge me 350 baht a month(on contract, i belive AIS charge around 750) for all BIS services then i downloaded the enterpirse actiavation from appworld http://bit.ly/activatebes then as im the IT guy anyway I set a BES p/w then entered that and voila it was done.

In a nutshell here it is, with a normal Blackberry Internet Service you will have no problem connecting with Exchange at no extra cost, but this will only sync email and nothing else

If you pay for Blackberry Internet Service and then pay Cobweb for there BES plan then you should be able to sync email/contacts/calendar/tasks/notes between Outlook and BB over the air

So the question is does your wife want these extra syncing features if so they pay for BES, if she is happy with just email syncing then no need for BES plan

Hope this helps

Thank you. my wife would prefer to sync contacts and calendar as well so BIS would not be sufficient. Since writing the original post I learnt that you can use MS Exchange Outlook Web Access with BIS. Is this the same as the Enterprise Activation process you refer to above? So OWA with BIS only syncs email?