One of the more useful benefits of purchasing Premier Support (TSupport levels Tx4 and Tx5) from Research In Motion are the BlackBerry Infrastructure Notifications. With that said, it’s one of those features that should be available to practically any business customer of RIM, especially in the event of a major outage or network / infrastructure maintenance that would potentially impact their users. However, these notifications are not offered for free and the Premier Support programs are quite expensive.
In fact, based on a deployment of 7,500 users across 20 BlackBerry Enterprise Servers, Tx4 would cost roughly $275,000 and Tx5 would end up in the neighborhood of $300,000. For a smaller company wanting these notifications, in addition to the other useful features such as dedicated support personnel (DART), the program fee for the Tx4 and Tx5 programs respectively start at $50,000 and $75,000. This does not include the per-server and per-user additional support costs. Considering the impact of BlackBerry outages in recent years and the ever-growing importance of the BlackBerry device functionality, one would think that RIM would offer the BlackBerry Infrastructure Notifications as a low cost a la carte solution, right? They don’t.
Enter the Un-Official RIM Outages Mailing List. This is a community-driven mailing list that relies on it’s members to contribute outage notifications, maintenance notifications, real-time outage observations, etc. There are no affiliations to Research In Motion or any carriers who offer BlackBerry service. This is a non-profit mailing list that’s sole existence is based on the importance of BlackBerry technology and the demand for information when service outages or interruptions are happening. Feel jittery when you’re got a BlackBerry outage on your hands? Crave the push-email madness? Are you breaking into other peoples offices to see if their BlackBerry has capital EDGE on the screen? This list might help you. If not, you might want to check yourself into rehab, you fiends.
