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Watch Facebook make my BlackBerry contacts better. What about Lotus Connections profiles?


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We were having an issue with certain BlackBerry devices not being able to turn on integration features on the updated Facebook application.  In short, the new Facebook app should allow you to integrate messaging, calendar synchronization and contact matching.  However the calendar and messaging option was grayed out on our BES devices, but enabled for those not BES server connected.  So off we went to the BES server policies.  A sample of what we saw on the devices is below.

Image:Watch Facebook make my BlackBerry contacts better. What about Lotus Connections profiles?

What we discovered after reading a ton was there was no policy that controlled the options,  only for a BES 4.x server.  There is a new policy in BES 5 that let's the administrator control how Social Applications interact with devices that have applied policies from BES servers.  It not only controls Facebook, but has very special settings for Lotus Connections individually.  It definitely shows how Lotus and RIM are working together.

So what did we do for the BES 4.x server??  BlackBerry just released a downloadable policy update for BES 4 servers.  You import the policy update, make the necessary changes, apply the updated policy to the users and they are almost instantly able to work with the new features.

The new policy area allows the BES administrator and to control data access on the device for social networking applications.  You can read about the policy update from this technote . It will also point you to a secondary one where you should download the additional policy.

What we did notice missing was the same integration for Lotus Connections.  It would be nice to have profile information, including pictures, pulled in to match my address book like the Facebook application.  Also, the ability to bring Activities into the calendar would be of huge benefit.  Moving into Bookmarks (Dogears) and having those sync to the Blackberry would make Connections a seamless integration point as well.

I'm just saying.