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Can anyone tell me what the difference is between the BES epxress and small business edition is? From what I have read they are both identical in capabilities and also both have a 15 user limit. But the BES express edition is free and comes with 1 user license and SBE costs about £800 but comes with 5 user licenses. Buying a 5 user CAL pack costs about £350 (from what I have seen). So if there is no difference why would anyone buy the SBE when they could get the Express edition free and just add 5 more licenses for about £350?

Is there any fundamental difference between express and SBE?

wfaulk
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DaveJohnston
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1 Answers1

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it really depends on network. For example t-mobile will sometimes give out some licences for free (up to 5 i think) and you also get 1 free lience when you download blackberry professional server from RIM.

You basically have 3 products

BPS - Blackberry Professional Server (Cut down bes that can be loaded onto exchange server) up to 30 users

BES SBE - From my understanding this was what BPS was before it became BPS (someone please correct me if im wrong)

Full BES - All the bells and whistles but must be loaded on its own server.

It really comes down to what you will be doing with the product, if you just need basic bes functionality then BPS would be fine. But for the extra stuff mainly for large amounts of users you would want full bes.

Also im not sure which networks support what, t-mob did do BPS but are now saying its being discontinued with the release of 5.0 and in a Vodafone webinar i took part in rim/voda said they were getting out of the small business bes server, which sounded madness to me. But i would recommend checking the details with your network, but BPS should be fine, we run it here no problems. If you need any help with setup let me know as i have a fair amount of experiance with this now (and ive taken the server support certifications recently too :))

Ben Gillam
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  • Unfortunately BPS doesn't support OTA application deployment, which is a must for us, so we have to stick with BES Express. I was just trying to work out why anyone would pay for BES SBE when they could get Express for free and just add more licenses. As far as I can tell they are both the same in terms of capabilities. – DaveJohnston Sep 19 '09 at 14:36
  • which network are you dealing with? as ive been told by a couple of them that sbe you cant get any more and that the only choices were BES full and BPS now and at that BPS was being phased out. I wish they would all sign from the samn sheet heh. – Ben Gillam Sep 22 '09 at 08:55
  • How would one go about trying to convince their T-Mobile rep to hook them up with some free BPS licences? We only have two phones, but we might get it up to three sometime soon. – phuzion Dec 18 '09 at 15:43