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Here’s a blog entry I wrote for IBBUG’s new “week in the life” feature.

Monday
My name is David Williams, and I’m the National I.T. Manager for a “blue-collar” labour-hire company, providing employment to thousands of skilled and unskilled workers via temporary assignment to companies in need. Our network spans the entire east coast of Australia and some inland offices. I’m pleased to work for a company which places a high value on technology and innovation. All our contact management, rate generation, order history and business intelligence in general is stored in a large custom, in-house, Lotus Domino database app. While looking for ways to help mobilise our salesforce and keep them in touch with this database, I explored wireless modems but these had massive costs.

Then I came across the BlackBerry and I could immediately see the enormous wealth of options and potential in my mind – I was immediately sold. We got the Domino BES 2.2 and have never looked back. All client interactions by our call centre or field staff are logged in our main app and automatically e-mailed out to the relevant business managers. We seriously produce thousands of e-mails every day but the peace of mind is enormous; our staff are up-to-date with all issues and orders right on-the-spot, no matter where on the earth they may be. This is a previously unparalled level of control and mobility, two forces which normally compete.

What I especially like is how easy all was to set up; it took me less than an hour to have the BES running and our first 10 units working. The MDS was a snap. The flat pricing irrespective of data usage is a dream. We’ve only had two integration issues. The first is that we had to get a service pack for the Desktop Manager before it would synchronise with Lotus Notes 6. The second problem was with the Lotus Notes’ phone memo. Our staff use that heavily, but it doesn’t display on the BlackBerry. The reason is simple: the memo uses custom fields and not the regular “body” field, and the BlackBerry just displays the body field. Thinking that surely others have had this problem I search Lotus Notes and BlackBerry forums and message boards but nobody has any code. I’m surprised, but it turns out to be fairly simple to implement. I just modify the mail template so the QuerySend event on the phone memo builds up the body field by combining all the special fields. This works and my users are happy.

Tuesday
We’re still on BES 2.2 but I know BES 4.0 is out. We’re itching to get it but our telco is really dragging the chain. We knew RIM had released it but Telstra still were “testing”. Finally, finally, they made it available but with only a very slow rollout to existing customers. I’m a bit disappointed; we’ve given Telstra some very good publicity. I’ve acted as a reference site for some of their sales, and we’ve been interviewed for their promotions to target groups. Yet, we’re still waiting in the queue. I think I may have got a solution; we’ve hit our 20 license limit and our account manager has given assurance if we buy an additional 10 licenses now it will kick off our upgrade to BES 4.0 at the same time. It’ll also be at the “old” pricing and less than paying for 10 more licenses after we upgraded.

I’m really wanting BES 4.0; I think the enterprise activation will save us a lot of trouble with remote installations. I think the facility to wirelessly accept and decline calendar invitations will be tremendous. Most of all, the General Manager wants JavaScript so he can use his favourite football tipping Web site on the BlackBerry Browser!

I spend some time showing people how they can personalise their BlackBerry a bit. I like to have as much on the screen as I can. Others like their font to be bold so they can read it easier. My offsider has his set to 6-point font which shows an incredible amount of text. That’s excellent, but for me is just a bit too small.

Wednesday
At last the CDMA model is available in Australia! Here the GSM network gives good coverage in metropolitan areas but coverage is pretty poor in many regional locations – but three of our offices are regional. Those guys have no coverage whatsoever when driving between towns (not that I’d encourage anyone to drive and read or write at the same time!). There is a CDMA network which gives far superior coverage in those locations. Not only that, I expect the data transfer should be faster using CDMA. This is somethingwe’ve been waiting on from our telco for absolutely months. But it’s here at last! I’ve just ordered five units. I wanted the 7750 because the screen is so much better, but unfortunately Telstra are only supplying the 7250. I feel it is somewhat short-sighted of them not to consider the 7750.

The General Manager is keen to get the “Kill Bill” whistling theme as his ringtone. I find a reasonable midi file and the GM is happy. Always a good sign. Meanwhile, one of the other managers just broke his BlackBerry … arrghh. We don’t have any spares, so I’ve arranged with our telco account manager for us to pick one up at a local Telstra shopfront. I send my offsider out to get a shiny new 7730. He proposes that the manager needs one now so he’ll give him his 7230 and take the 7730 for himself. Heh – not to worry, that manager is earmarked for an upgrade to the Bluetooth 7290 in time.

I spend some time showing people the different ways they can handle their e-mail. As a heavy BlackBerry user, I like all my e-mail to be on my handheld. Then I can refer to ticket numbers, usernames and all sorts of information no matter where I am. I set my BlackBerry so it receives messages even if in the cradle. Some of our staff want to work differently. One lady wants her BlackBerry to be like a “to do” list, and she can delete e-mails from it as she does things, with the ultimate goal being no messages in her inbox at the end of the day. Of course, she doesn’t want to delete her e-mail from her inbox so I show her how to ensure deletions on the handheld only delete on the handheld. One of our managers – the one who broke his BlackBerry – wants to have all the mail in his inbox show on his handheld, but if he files a message he only wants it to show on his desktop. If he deletes, he wants it to happen both on the handheld and in his inbox. I show him how to set that up. I’m sure others will want different configurations again.

Thursday
We’ve upset one of our clients. Our company is a 24-hour operation. Yet, our head office is only staffed between 5am – 11pm weekdays (and yes, I get calls at both ends of that period!). After 11pm and on weekends our phones divert to an on-call consultant’s mobile. She missed two calls last night. She told me the BlackBerry must have automatically turned its volume off because she never heard the phone ring, but did have voicemail in the morning. I explained it doesn’t just switch volume off and on – and the lack of “missed calls” in her message list showed the phone didn’t actually ring. She either had it off (perhaps by auto on/off) or was out of range.

I’ve got to make a solution, but the company doesn’t want to spend a lot of money. I figure we could divert the after-hours phones to an answering service, instead of voicemail, if a call is missed. I found some answering services but most only take calls between 9am – 5pm so they’re out. Another will take calls for us at all hours and will then call a list of people we specify until they get someone to answer. However, they’re $95/month and $1.50 per incident. The company doesn’t want to spend that. Finally I found a service that will take our calls anytime and charge either 85c per incident or $5/month and 65c per incident – dirt cheap. The only catch is they will just send the message via an SMS and e-mail. Aha – “e-mail” – the magic word. Immediately I set up a special e-mail group, and tell the answering service to use that. Now all our after-hours phones divert to this service. If they miss a call the service takes it. They send an SMS back to the phone that missed the call, but also e-mail my new group – and viola, the dulcit tones of BlackBerry’s are heard throughout Australia. If one person misses the call, there’s now an opportunity for someone else in their team to take it and the company saves face. Three of our managers go out to visit the company and we demonstrate it live right then and there; the customer is impressed and happy with our solution. If we didn’t have BlackBerrys I could probably still rig up some solution where the mailing list disperses via SMS but then we’d have to get some sort of SMS gateway and spend more money.

Friday
Today I will be setting up a few more auto-emailed reports. When I first started with the company in 2002, the accountant made a “margin report” at the end of each month. All the business managers would desperately wait for this report to come out. It took the accountant a day to make all the reports, for each branch. I was astounded; this was a perfect candidate for automation. As we are a labour-hire company, the main indicator of our sales are measured by the timesheets we receive from the field employees each week. I set up a Web-based intranet which pulled down all the timesheet information each night. This meant the next day, margins and other financial information was available online, and up-to-date as of the midnight just past. This was something very simple for me to do, but everyone loved it. It gave accurate and up-to-date sales data every day, and it freed the accountant up a day a month.

When we got the BlackBerrys I thought we could take this further. I set my report to be auto-emailed to business managers at 5am each weekday. This was absolutely loved; to my mind this was a no-brainer, it was something which took me no effort to do – but to our salespeople it was seriously the “killer app” for the BlackBerry. They start the day with full knowledge of how their sales are tracking. The value of this can’t be underestimated.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to reproduce the sheer exuberance that first auto-emailed report got, but I have some other daily e-mailed reports in mind. In essence, anything that people check on daily is a prime candidate for something which can – and should – just be pushed out to staff automatically.

Saturday
No rest for the wicked, so I must have been pretty wicked. Every Saturday I may get a call or two. It’s part of being a responsible professional, I guess. And not only that, it’s also a matter of pride. I care for my network, I have an emotional involvement in it. I simply couldn’t leave a problem until the next weekday, so I’m always working on something on the weekend. Fortunately my wife is extremely tolerant but the BlackBerry has made things better. We can go out driving or shopping or doing things and even if I take a message, I can often reply and resolve the matter quickly – with no need to get home, to grab a laptop, to drop by the office or any of that.

Last year, my family went on a holiday to the U.S. Without wanting to overestimate my importance, I knew my absence would be something that required a lot of preparation! I gave four months notice, I was looking for a company to provide backup I.T. support … but then I discovered the BlackBerry. Immediately I could see the enormous benefits of being in touch, but in a discrete way. Some people may think how horrible to be reached while vacationing on the other side of the world. Yet, it gave both the company and I a great piece of mind. I got e-mails, but I could reply to them while waiting in queues, while my wife was having a shower and I was sitting around or other inobtrusive ways. I didn’t have to find an Internet cafe. I didn’t have to dial up via modem. It didn’t interfere with our holiday, and it did mean the company had support and help, and I knew what was going on with my network.

Some people say to me, “don’t you hate that beeping all day” but the honest answer is I don’t; as the I.T. guy every single time a BlackBerry sounds off it is a status update. Every BlackBerry beep tells me my server is still up. It tells me e-mail is working. It tells me our Internet connection is up. It tells me the mobile phone network is functional.

Sunday
Where will the BlackBerry evolve to? I think in time we’ll see the technology licensed by more and more mobile phone and handheld manufacturers. I think always-on push technology will become ubiquituous. To my mind, the full keyboard is essential – I don’t think I could ever happily use a 7100. I think the BlackBerry’s future will involve more than e-mail; it will be instrumental in realising roaming, seamless Internet connectivity. While in Europe on business in 2001, my mobile phone switched from carrier to carrier as I crossed country boundaries. I began thinking about how well this worked and wondered when the day would come when I could have a wireless Internet connection on my laptop that switched seamlessly from signal tower to tower, from carrier to carrier, without disrupting my session. I believe the day is coming when wireless connectivity will be all around us and that the Internet will always be available on any device, in any location. I believe the BlackBerry will be a key driver for this direction.

I’ll conclude with one last thought: I’m working in my spare time (as rare as this is) on making a heavily scaled-down version of our main app to run on the BlackBerrys. I think this will be an enormous advance. I can’t wait to release it. At least with the BlackBerry I feel confident there are no technical limitations; the only constraints now are simply what we can conceive and the number of hours in the day.