After months of vacillation RIM is finally getting its act together and attempting to regain some of the initiative in the enterprise phone market by announcing its intention to offer IT the ability to establish boundaries around those aspects of a device it controls and those that it leaves in the hands of its owner/user. Blackberry Balance, which is expected to be launched in the next month or two, is RIM’s attempt to mollify enterprise IT admins who require the ability to control enterprise data on employee owned devices, while giving a clear message to employee’s that it is also thinking about their expectations of privacy on both employee owned and enterprise provided devices.
RIM is adding features to its phone that give IT the mans to choose to wipe only corporate information from a device should it go astray as well as the means to prevent users from cutting work data and pasting it into a personal application or email. Other features include warnings when sending emails or calendar invites outside of the organization, the ability to encrypt media cards and options for preventing access to work data by third-party applications. There’s no news yet if RIM intend to port Balance over to the Playbook or not.
While this stops some way short of the capabilities proposed by proponents of mobile hypervisors, it at least puts RIM back in contention as the only vendor offering this level of control today.
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