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TECH SUPPORT Firms looking to simplify and improve management of so many devices. BY GERRY B LACKWELL the BlackBerry jungle Taming aren't hard to find. But heavy reliance on the ubiquitous devices brings a down- side: when they don't work as expected, lawyers, understandably, freak out. Which is why Stikeman Elliott LLP L last year implemented a software-based BlackBerry monitoring and manage- ment system from BoxTone. U.S.-based BoxTone is one of a handful of compa- nies offering solutions designed to sim- plify and improve management of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) that large organizations like Stikeman main- tain. Zenprise is its main competitor. Stikeman's Toronto IT group supports over 500 BlackBerry users around the world. The firm has offices in Toronto; Vancouver; Calgary; Ottawa; New York City; London, England; and Sydney, Australia. Another 200 users are man- aged out of the firm's Montreal office from a second BlackBerry server, but it hasn't implemented BoxTone yet. awyers have embraced Research In Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry smart- phone with great gusto. The reasons Last year, Stikeman users sent over a million mail messages from their BlackBerrys, and received almost 12 million. "We realized that BlackBerry had become a critical application for lawyers," says Dean Nazir, the firm's manager of technical services. "They were relying heavily on them to stay in touch with clients and when there were problems, they demanded we solve them quickly. We were finding it increasingly difficult to do that." Minor problems, sometimes the result of something the lawyer had done incor- rectly or minor glitches somewhere in the system, crop up three or four times a day, says Nazir. Much less frequently, the helpdesk will receive a flood of calls from lawyers all with the same problem. A user will typically report that he hasn't received an e-mail he knows someone has sent him, or isn't receiving e-mails at all. (BlackBerry servers are supposed to forward messages from the firm's main Microsoft Exchange e-mail server to the handheld device over a cellular network as soon as they arrive in a user's Exchange mailbox.) To solve the problem, technicians must be able to determine whether the fault is with the BlackBerry device, the Exchange server, the BES, or one of the mobile carriers Stikeman uses in dif- ferent parts of the country for cellular telephony and BlackBerry e-mail. As in most organizations, the firm's technical support operation includes first-level and second-level agents as well as highly specialized experts who handle the most complex problems. The first-level reps are the jacks of all trades with the least depth of knowledge in any one subject. To complicate things, few of them actually carry BlackBerrys themselves, so they don't have intimate familiarity with how they work. The root problem is that the manage- ment software that runs on the BES itself is not very friendly. Experienced BES administrators — of which Stikeman has two — can fairly quickly troubleshoot a problem by looking at recent activity www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com M ARCH 2010 27 MATTHEW DALEY