Research In Motion (RIM) has announced the general availability of BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365. This new service is targeted at business and government organisations and extends Microsoft Exchange Online to BlackBerry smartphones, allowing customers to manage their BlackBerry deployments in the cloud.

The service is available at no additional charge to current medium-sized or enterprise subscribers of the Office 365 suite or standalone Exchange Online. It works with BlackBerry smartphones on either business or consumer data plans.

According to the Canadian smartphone and tablet maker BlackBerry Business Cloud Services offers advanced administration and flexible smartphone self-service features to support an organisation’s BlackBerry deployment in the cloud.

Key features include:

“RIM is pleased to launch BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365. This new cloud-based option allows customers to cost-effectively support mobility across their organisations and easily manage and secure their BlackBerry deployments,” said Alan Panezic, vice president of Enterprise Product Management and Marketing at RIM.

“We continue to build upon the end-to-end BlackBerry solution for our business and government customers with both on-premise and cloud-based solutions, a range of technical support options to suit any size organisation, and a growing ecosystem of apps and services for users.”  

 

In related news Microsoft recently announced the start of the Office 15 technical preview program, marking an important phase in the development of the next version of its business productivity suite.