Tips for getting out of a BlackBerry jam

Margaret Genet knows BlackBerrys. Though officially dubbed "operations analyst," she's the first Aflac employee to hold the unofficial title of "technology concierge." Her job: Teach executives to be more efficient with mobile devices and applications. "I guarantee if you talk to [Genet] for 15 minutes, she will tell you 30 tricks you didn't know that will save you time," says Aflac CIO Gerald Shields.

Many of Genet's tips can be found deep inside various user manuals or BlackBerry websites, but who has time to dig? Here's a short list of her advice:

Messaging: In the e-mail inbox, press the S key to search for a sender or a word within a subject line or mail folder regardless of whether the message was sent or received.

Within the inbox, access the complete list of messages sent by hitting the ALT key followed by the O key. To access the complete list of messages received, hit the ALT key followed by the I key.

Phone Functions: Multitask during calls by hitting the BlackBerry menu key and selecting Home Screen. You'll have access to e-mail and other documents -- though most devices don't allow simultaneous voice and data transfer, so Internet access is unavailable while on calls.

Find specific contacts from your home screen by pressing keys for first and last initials, with a space between them.If more than one contact has the same initials, scroll to the appropriate contact.

Back to Basics: To put a device into Standby Mode so keys cannot be pressed while it's not in use, hold down the Mute key for a moment. Undo it by holding Mute for a few seconds. If a BlackBerry malfunctions or freezes, remove the battery and SIM card-if it has one-and wait a few seconds before reinserting.

(Note: Some tricks may not work on all older BlackBerrys.)

--Al Sacco

By the numbers consumer tech: CIOs remain divided over adoption and support

To support, or not to support? CIOs are asking themselves that question when it comes to consumer or Web 2.0 technologies in the workplace. So far, opinions remain split around this issue, according to a CIO magazine poll of 311 IT decision makers regarding their views on consumer technologies in the enterprise.

The survey found that two-thirds of respondents offer some type of consumer technology as corporate applications to their employees, mostly IM (50 per cent), wikis (30 per cent) or blogs (23 per cent). Some 29 per cent are monitoring the business case for mainstreaming such technologies.

However, 54 per cent of respondents believe consumer applications are "inappropriate for corporate use," while more than a third say they take the draconian measure of shutting down any unsupported technology as soon as they detect it.

To understand which consumer technologies made IT executives cringe the most, we asked them: Which consumer technologies pose the greatest threat to your organization? A clear consensus emerged on the number-one threat: portable storage devices.

In fact, 43 per cent of respondents believe external hard drives, iPods and USB devices pose the greatest security threat to their organizations. However, other technologies also worry survey respondents. Nearly one in five (18 per cent) view consumer e-mail as the greatest consumer tech security threat followed by instant messaging (11 per cent), social networking sites (9 per cent) and smart phones/PDAs (7 per cent).

Best practices

Resist the urge to shut it down. Blocking sites such as Facebook or consumer e-mail like Gmail doesn't stop workers from accessing those applications over their iPhone while at work. Talk to users to find out why they're using a consumer technology. Maybe they're using Facebook to connect with customers.

Reevaluate usage policies. Dust off that user agreement you've had sitting in your filing cabinet since 1997 and update it to include things like iPhones, Facebook and Skype.

Trust your users. In the end, employees are measured by their productivity. If they use IM to chat with friends, odds are you'll pick up on it.

--Laurianne McLaughlan