Headaches remain

Users pinpointed two potential headaches with 5.0. Existing software configurations (those bundles of applications) can be carried over to Argon initially. But creating new ones will require that the old ones also be recreated. "There are going to be some growing pains with software configurations [in 5.0]," a RIM manager acknowledged last week to his symposium audience. "The lack of software configurations migrating to 5.0 will be a big pain point," says Frank Lofaro, a sales engineer for the same software vendor as Justin Bortnick, and a former enterprise BES administrator.

The second issue is the continuing lack of any connection between the BES and Microsoft Active Directory. "There is zero interaction with Active Directory," says Bortnick. "We're still looking at that," said a RIM manager during a question-answer session after a 5.0 presentation.

"It sounds like they're saying it won't be there in the initial release," says Lofaro. Part of the problem is simply the size of Active Directory entries for large companies. A company with 50,000 employees could easily have a directory loaded with a half million entries. The BES somehow has to read all that data or import it and read it for its own use. "Administrators will want good response times and that will be hard to do."