BoxTone is about to announce a new product, called Essentials, that will give small to medium businesses some help in keeping their BlackBerry rollout managed. BoxTone’s software basically helps IT admins in companies to figure out what’s wrong with employees’ BlackBerrys and get them fixed with minimal fuss – ideally spotting the problems before end-users ever see them. One of the major complaints that I’ve heard from BlackBerry admins about BoxTone in particular is that, while it’s the most popular option out there, it’s very expensive (most BoxTone setups cost in the $25-$30k range). BoxTone Essentials is hoping to address that concern by being priced at $9k for a smaller suite of vital tools for mobility administrators, including:
- The core monitoring dashboard
- Analysis console to zoom in on specific stats
- User console to see what’s going on with a single individual’s device
- Smart alerting to proactively detect problems before they start
Of course, the full product has a lot more modules, but for smaller companies, this is a pretty reasonable start. For a demo of Essentials in action and some potential problem situations, hit up BoxTone’s site. More info will be available shortly from boxtone.com/essentials