Set up BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Office 365

Microsoft's Office 365 cloud platform promises to make IT simpler for smaller businesses by allowing in-house servers to be moved to the cloud. So, instead of running Exchange servers internally, a copy of Exchange is instead run in a Microsoft data centre, but there is one problem BlackBerry Enterprise Server can't connect to a cloud Exchange server.

Fortunately, Microsoft and RIM have worked to solve that problem and BlackBerry Business Cloud Services recently went into production. A free add-on for Office 365, this is a cloud-hosted BlackBerry server that can deliver email and RIM services like BBM.

BlackBerry Business Cloud Services doesn't provide the full set of BES features, though. There's no secure access to business data, or VOIP services and only a basic set of device profiles. However, it is easy to set up and use, and allows BlackBerry devices to work with Office 365 all at no extra cost.