Which enterprise developer benefits are you most excited about?

Last week the BlackBerry® 10 Jam World Tour – Enterprise Edition was held in Madrid, Spain. 121 developers took part in some very interesting sessions, demonstrations, and workshops. With these events, Research In Motion® (RIM®) aims to help enterprise developers find out what the BlackBerry® 10 platform has to offer and provide experts in building applications to show developers the wide variety of tools currently available. These tools include BlackBerry® WebWorks™ using HTML5, CSS and Javascript®, and the NDK/Cascades™ leveraging C++. On this occasion, attendees also become versed in BlackBerry MDS-CS, BlackBerry® Enterprise Service 10, and BlackBerry advantages in security.

In the opening session, Eduardo Fernández, Managing Director at RIM for Southwest Europe, welcomed all attendees with a message of RIM’s dedication to the enterprise segment, highlighting that RIM continues to work tirelessly to respond to the needs of all businesses. Gregg Ostrowski, Senior Director of Enterprise Developer Partnerships, talked about the importance of developing for enterprise and highlighted the benefits that BlackBerry 10 brings to enterprise developers, such as the ability to create applications with behind-the-firewall connections, secure information with VPN connection, applications with the ability to be pushed to devices by administrators, leading development standards such as HTML5 and C++, and full management of applications with BlackBerry App World™ for Work. He also offered an exciting live demonstration of the BlackBerry 10 platform on a Dev Alpha device.

Gregg also laid out certain services and features that are vital for enterprise developers, such as BlackBerry® Balance™, which helps employees separate their professional data from their work content. BlackBerry® Mobile Fusion was also positioned as a trusted solution for tackling the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend, as it allows IT administrators to manage multiple platforms in a secure environment.

In the afternoon, developers attended sessions where they were shown how to build enterprise applications for RIM’s new upcoming operating system including enterprise mobility, enterprise architecture, and enterprise design. During the Jam Session, they were also given the opportunity to attend hands-on labs with the BlackBerry WebWorks and Cascades NDK tooling to get an all-encompassing look at BlackBerry 10, thus broadening their building capacities. Developers were delighted to discover the potential of the new BlackBerry 10 platform, and to get familiar with the development framework options.

To further ensure that enterprise developers have the tools they need, they were also offered a free 20-user version of BlackBerry Mobile Fusion. This allows them to build their applications with the direct VPN-like connection, leverage Push, and manage their applications using BlackBerry Balance technology. Qualifying enterprise developers were also given a BlackBerry Dev Alpha device, providing them with the chance to test their enterprise applications before submitting them to the BlackBerry App World.

The BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour – Enterprise Edition events continue. Check www.blackberryjamenterprise.com for all of the details!

BlackBerry® Jam Enterprise kicks off next week in Toronto and London. This time around, we’ll be focusing on Enterprise app development. These events differ from the BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour in that they are geared towards developers looking to create apps for their organization, or for the general business community. Strategy and capability for deploying apps within organizations is also a key theme that we’ll be addressing.

Join us in North America, EMEA, & LATAM across these dates and locations:

North America

October 23 – Toronto, ON, Canada
October 25 – Ottawa, ON, Canada
November 8 – Washington, DC, USA
November 13 – New York, NY, USA
November 28 – Chicago, IL, USA

EMEA

October 23 – London, UK
November 1 – Amsterdam, Netherlands
November 6 – Frankfurt, Germany
November 15 – Madrid, Spain

Latin America

November 6 – São Paulo, Brazil
November 16 – Mexico City, Mexico

As with prior BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour events, registration is free but space is limited. A number of BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha devices will also be distributed to those that are eligible. So what are you waiting for? Come out to a full day of events dedicated to providing the Enterprise developer community with insights on the upcoming BlackBerry 10 platform: its strengths, the vision, and how Enterprise developers can build apps that deliver real business value.

Sign up today and we’ll see you there!

We will have a number of exciting topics to cover during the webinar, including the following:

• What is BlackBerry® Mobile Fusion?
• BlackBerry Balance technology
  • Personal & Corporate perimeters
  • Protecting data at rest
  • Enterprise application connectivity & security
• Enterprise application management
• Mobile application integration

I am very excited to share the vast improvements that we have made in deploying your BlackBerry 10 application within the enterprise, along with enabling your enterprise application to securely connect to your corporate backend and provide a fully integrated experience.

Registration is open now, so please sign up to reserve your spot and I will see you on August 30th.

As someone who has been engaged with our enterprise customers for the past 11 years, I’ve had the luxury of seeing so many well-built applications really change the way in which a business operates. These range from simple tasks like allowing an internal intranet page to be viewed on a smartphone to fully integrated workflow applications. I’ve also seen many of them never leave the proof-of-concept state. The number one reason that these fail is because in the end they cannot interact with real data, meaning that they do not have any connectivity to a backend data source where the relevant information resides. Unfortunately what often happens is that the application is built first and then shown off to executives and stakeholders with dummy data. Once they’re committed, the developer or project owner faces the sizable challenge of connecting a front-end mobile application to back-end data. This often requires additional investment and can prolong the development.

When building custom enterprise apps for BlackBerry® smartphones connected to a BlackBerry® Enterprise Server or BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablets connected to BlackBerry® Device Service, we’ve worked to make it simple to create this type of connection. A component is available called BlackBerry MDS Connection Service (or MDS-CS), which helps to provide a VPN-like connection to the backend, allowing your application to easily connect to important data. It connects apps on BlackBerry devices to information stored on an organization’s servers or web servers, processing push and pull requests for data. Data conversion, optimization, authentication methods, access control, and much more can be configured using MDS-CS.

Take this scenario, for example: You have a workflow application to provide your executives with the ability to approve a time-sensitive contract. In this instance, you can build an application for BlackBerry smartphones without trying to reinvent the connection; it’s already there. Unlike VPN connections, there is no need for the end user to invoke a session, nor do you need to build that into your app. It is simply just there.

Here’s a high level overview of the architecture that allows for that inherent connection in BlackBerry devices. Develop along these lines with confidence; MDS-CS will remain part of the future for the BlackBerry Enterprise solution.

Let’s get that app off of the drawing board and into the hands of a mobile workforce – don’t forget connectivity, and when it does come time, consider the elements that are already in place with BlackBerry smartphones and tablets connected through enterprise servers. Learn more by checking out the Feature and Technical Overview for MDS Connection Service.

Has your organization developed a custom application? How does it connect to back-end data? Share in the comments below.

New York City is known for many things, including being financial center of the world and home to many media & entertainment firms — and as you’ll see, this stop of the BlackBerry® 10 Jam World Tour had elements of both of these. First, the event was held in one of the original theaters on Broadway – now part of the Millenium Hotel in Times Square. This theater was replete with gold trim and multiple balcony levels. The stage and side balconies of this historic theater were festooned with BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour signage. We had a great developer turnout with attendees from interactive agencies, media companies, banks and financial firms – one developer even flew in from Vancouver to attend!

To match this high-powered group of developers in the audience, we had an equally strong lineup of speakers to tell the BlackBerry 10 story. The event was anchored by Marty Mallick’s keynote, which did a tremendous job in presenting the BlackBerry 10 call to action to this audience. The team had many discussions with the developers about the tremendous growth in BlackBerry App World™ developer registrations and apps in the catalog.

Gary Klassen presented the user experience session, and it made a great impact to have a key product team leader on stage since many audience members knew of Gary’s BBM™ pedigree (evidenced by many tweets about the “inventor of BBM on stage”). Gary did a great job telling the story of the evolution of our BlackBerry products, emphasizing the laser focus we’ve had on improving the user experience for our high performance, multi-tasking customers and how BlackBerry 10 takes this to the next level. Gary brought a unique viewpoint to this stop as he could talk about his own work on both the existing BlackBerry platform and BlackBerry 10.

The developers were very excited to see Patrick Mollins on stage delivering the architecture overview, since he was known by many of the BlackBerry developers in the crowd as the BlackBerry evangelist they’ve seen at our many east coast events. For our technical tracks, we had Tim Windsor covering BlackBerry® WebWorks™ and HTML5, Shadid Haque delivered the Native track, and Brent Thornton, Jim Ing & team covered the enterprise track. This group of developers wanted content from all the technical tracks which was great to see!

The ten lightning pitches were very diverse and somewhat fitting for the event in the nation’s financial capital. Our winner was Alex Garipan, who had created a sophisticated stock analysis tool for the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet that featured direct manipulation of the price charts to drill down on the data set and many other cool analysis features!  We also had applications that implemented photo publishing via email or physical postcards, and a sophisticated plant reference tool for the avid gardener.

We left NYC with a group of energized BlackBerry 10-ready developers, and we look forward to seeing the apps they build — thanks New York! The BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour rolls on to Toronto on Thursday, June 21st.

Yesterday’s WebWorks session at #BB10Jam was awesome and even got my 14 year old inspired to create apps. @BlackBerryDev

— DJ Reyes  (@djr3yes) June 15, 2012

N4_BB: NYC #BB10Jam: Gary showing BB10 keyboard. Prediction, slick, and sharp. Wow! dlvr.it/1kxW4r

— Onita Catoe (@Onitael79) June 19, 2012

Wow great day at #BB10Jam NYC. Got my Dev Alpha! Met some great people.@BlackBerryDev expect great things to come from me!

— James Paul Muir (@jamespaulmuir) June 19, 2012

Lighting Pitch of a stocks app. Dev asks what’s our fav stock. Everyone replies “RIM” #BB10Jam

— JT Teran (@AgentBlackBerry) June 19, 2012

From Kony Solutions’ press release:

“Kony Solutions, the leading mobile application development platform (MADP) provider, announced that it is one of the first mobile platform providers to support the new BlackBerry® 10 platform. Kony customers and partners can expand their mobile applications to support BlackBerry 10 users immediately, with just a few clicks of a button.
Kony’s flagship product is its KonyOne mobile enterprise application platform. Kony’s patent-pending “Write Once, Run Everywhere” technology enables developers to deploy their apps across more than 10,000 mobile smartphones/tablets/kiosks and operating systems from a single code base. All Kony applications can be delivered in native and mobile web (HTML5 and non-HTML5), across every mobile channel. Kony offers the mobile industry’s most comprehensive Service Level Agreement, ensuring support for new versions of existing platforms or OS within 30 days of code release, and within 90 days for any new device or OS.”

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

Today, I am very excited to introduce you to BlackBerry® Device Service, which is the component of BlackBerry® Mobile Fusion used to manage BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablets and future BlackBerry® 10 devices. BlackBerry Mobile Fusion is RIM’s new unified multi-platform MDM (mobile device management) solution for managing in market BlackBerry OS devices, BlackBerry 10 devices, and iOS and Android™ devices as shown in the image above.

Why should you be excited about the launch of BlackBerry Device Service together with BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0? Well that’s simple. For those of you new to enterprise mobility, especially when it comes to BlackBerry, we’ve always had the secret sauce to enable your enterprise mobile applications to seamlessly connect to your backend application server with no need for an enterprise VPN. This secret sauce was our BlackBerry Mobile Data System (MDS) which abstracted away much of the wireless network complexities and provided an end to end, AES secure connection for enterprise application developers.

For those of you that have been long waiting for this feature, look no further as we are bringing this functionality back to BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 and future BlackBerry 10 devices. Just imagine if you were an insurance adjuster in the field and wanted an application:

• pushed to your BlackBerry PlayBook tablet
• to seamlessly upload both vehicles pictures and a brief description to your application server that resides behind your corporate firewall

Together with BlackBerry Device Service and BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0, these problems are solved! This is exactly what we have enabled both the corporate customers and enterprise developers to implement.

Although customers have long had the ability to push applications to BlackBerry users with a BlackBerry Enterprise Server, this is the first time we are introducing a user self-serve portal to manage all enterprise applications – right from BlackBerry App World™. With BlackBerry Balance™, enterprise applications are installed within a corporate perimeter on the device. For more information on BlackBerry Balance, be sure to read this blog post from the Inside BlackBerry Blog, and check out the BlackBerry Balance website as well.

Together, these features will protect all your resident enterprise application data within the corporate perimeter and at the same time provide a secure AES encrypted pipe to transport your data securely from behind the firewall. This is exactly why I share this excitement with all our enterprise development community today.

If you haven’t already done so, I would check for BlackBerry PlayBook OS upgrades and immediately upgrade your device to BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0. You can also download a free trial of BlackBerry Mobile Fusion today.

Mobile apps in the corporate environment are more creative and influential than ever, helping businesses work faster, more profitably, and with the kind of efficiency that others envy. Here’s why we think attending BlackBerry® DevCon Americas 2011 can help your corporation go even further and do even more.

1. Understand more about the tools and options. Many of the sessions at the show are designed to increase your know-how and skill base, such as:

• DEV19 – Introduction to the BlackBerry PlayBook Native SDK: Building a Sample Application
• DEV21 – Creating a UI using the BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK for Adobe AIR
• DEV22 – Mobile Application Architecture: How Do I Start?
• DEV23 – So You Think You Understand Mobile Web Services
• DEV29 – Lab: BlackBerry WebWorks Bootcamp for the BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet

2. Learn from another corporation’s success. Nothing teaches as well as a company willing to share their experience, and PricewaterhouseCoopers is offering to do just that. Don’t miss COM01 – Enterprise Application Development Made Easy: The PricewaterhouseCoopers Story.

3. Train with the best. Sign up for training sessions on using Adobe® Flex®, Adobe® AIR® and BlackBerry® WebWorks™ to build apps for the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet. Both one-day courses are offered on Monday, October 17 from 9 am to 5 pm and cost $499 USD.

4. Discuss and influence the future. BlackBerry DevCon 2011 features a new series of “Collaboration Roundtables”. GRP04 – Collaboration Roundtable: Native App Development for BlackBerry Tablet OS is your chance to join an interactive discussion and offer feature requests and feedback on the technology roadmap.

5. Get one-stop access to everything and everyone to do with BlackBerry. Weeks of learning on your own can’t compare to three focused days where everything about the BlackBerry platform and technologies and corporate development is in one place. The sessions, labs, speakers, experts and networking opportunities are all here. If you need to tell your boss why you should attend, we’ve made it easy by summarizing it all with this Convince Your Boss Letter!

Make sure you don’t miss out – register now.

The BlackBerry® DEVCON 2010 experience is your opportunity to get answers to your toughest development questions and champion your favorite feature requests directly to the development and product management experts from Research In Motion® (RIM).

But outside of the sessions, what are some of the ways to engage with all of the experts at the conference? How about Ask the Experts, Expert One-on-Ones or even Exclusive One-on-Ones? Read on for more!

Drop in to the Ask the Experts area where you can join RIM staff and your fellow attendees at a whiteboard to discuss the specific development topics you need to know more about. There are four main areas, and all are open Monday through Thursday throughout the conference:

• Java Development
• Web Development
• UI Design and Development
• Enterprise Applications

Expert One-on-One sessions are slightly different from the Ask the Experts area, in that sessions with subject matter experts need to be booked in advance. Sessions with experts will be available for the following topics:

• Graphics and Animation
• Data Storage
• Application Integration
• Multimedia
• Networking
• Location Based Services
• Security and Cryptography
• Debugging and Optimization
• BlackBerry Themes
• BlackBerry App World™
• Locate Service
• BlackBerry Push Service
• Commercialization Services
• BlackBerry Web Development Platform
• Go-to-Market
• BlackBerry Developer Program

Sessions can be booked at the DEVCON registration desk in front of the Ask the Experts area starting at 8:00 am Monday, September 27th through to Wednesday evening. The Expert One-on-One session schedule is below:

Last but not least, a new Exclusive One-on-One session taking place on Monday morning from 9:00 – 11:30 AM. This special session is a great opportunity for returning DEVCON attendees to kick off their conference experience by meeting with leading subject matter experts in an informal setting. This one is sure to become a classic.

For more information, please take a look at the DEVCON Access to the Experts section. Looking forward to seeing you all there!