BlackBerry Mobile Voice System 5 lets enterprise workers use their landline phone number and extension from their BlackBerry smartphone, Research In Motion said at the Wireless Enterprise Symposium April 26. The idea, much like the phone management capabilities of systems such as Google Voice, is to give employees a single work phone number to ring their desk phone and BlackBerry smartphone. BlackBerry MVS 5 is expected to be available later this summer from RIM's more than 400 carrier partners worldwide, including Best Buy, Wal-Mart and other retailers that sell electronics systems.
ORLANDO, Fla. -- Research In Motion Limited April 26
introduced Wi-Fi support to its new
BlackBerry Mobile Voice System 5, allowing enterprise workers to use their landline
phone number and extension from their BlackBerry smartphone.
MVS 5, which RIM unveiled at its Wireless Enterprise Symposium here, will let corporate workers make and receive phone
calls from their BlackBerry smartphone over their home WiFi network.
Users
can also look up numbers from the corporate directory from their BlackBerry's
address book, so users don't have to store personal mobile numbers that get
outdated, Allan
Brenner, senior vice president of BlackBerry platform for RIM, told
eWEEK.
Calls made through BlackBerry MVS are routed through a
corporate phone system/Private Branch Exchange (PBX) supplied by Cisco
Systems. The PBX is a telephone switching system that connects
telephone extensions
within corporate and outside networks.
Incoming calls ring simultaneously on
the employee's desk phone and BlackBerry smartphone. The idea, much like the phone management capabilities of
systems such as
Google Voice, is to give employees a single work phone number to ring their desk phone and BlackBerry smartphone.
"Employees can be more reachable through their work
phone number and can even enjoy the convenience of extension dialing from their
BlackBerry smartphone as well as the flexibility to move calls from their
BlackBerry smartphone to their desk phone," RIM said in a press release.
RIM's motivation for this move is plain. The phone maker noted that
over 75 million IP-based desk phones exist today worldwide, while IDC
estimates the global number of mobile workers will grow to 1.19 billion
by
2013, of which 65 million are home-based.
Routing business calls to both the desk phone and
BlackBerry mobile devices is a good way to help employees stay connected with
colleagues, partners and customers without managing two devices. Moreover, when
home or mobile workers use WiFi for mobile calls they will also save their companies
long-distance fees and international roaming charges.
For enterprise IT managers, MVS 5 offers several control
settings, including:
WiFi network access controls to set which WiFi networks
employees can access; network preferences with the option of prioritizing the
use of WiFi or cellular for making phone calls; authentication to help ensure
that only authorized BlackBerry smartphones have access to the corporate phone
system; and incoming call filtering.
BlackBerry MVS 5 includes a BlackBerry MVS smartphone
client software application, which can be distributed over the air to
BlackBerry smartphones through BlackBerry Enterprise Server, and
BlackBerry MVS
Server, which enables the communication between BlackBerry Enterprise
Server
and the PBX.
Brenner said BlackBerry MVS 5
is expected to be available later this summer from RIM's more than 400
carrier partners worldwide, including Best Buy, Wal-Mart and other
retailers that sell electronics systems. Retailers will set the prices
with RIM's recommendations.
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