I was no fan of BES 5.0. And they say Notes used to have a bad UI design! Well now I find myself torn. I could never recommend the "web development gone awry" user interface of BES 5.0 when it was first released. There was just no real business case. Yes, there was fail over, but in a WAN situation watch that puppy flip back and forth. The heartbeat was, well, not quite working right.

So now BES 5.0 SP1 is available (aka 5.0.1) we have some features beyond a "web UI" and (somewhat dodgy) fail over. I'm not sure the flip-flopping has been fixed, but I'm over that now. However, as with Domino, a minor point release also brings with it new features like the following:

• Support for Domino 8.5.1
• Support for SQL 2008
• Vmware 3.5 and 4.0 support
• Optimized user creation process

That's all very nice, but the real features that are making me even contemplate recommending this are:

• R8.x out of office support
• ID Vault support (for encrypted messages)
• ODF attachment support (OpenOffice and Lotus Symphony attachment formats)

Also, now that device OS 5.0 is slowly (very slowly) making it's way out you can now use the file browser to access files stored on a file server in the domain. Now, I prefer Quickr, but if you must, have at it. Speaking of which, RIM, where are your Quickr and Connections 2.5 clients?

If you need any of the features above, you can get BES 5.0 SP1 from the BlackBerry download site. If you are no longer on software support, T-Support or whatever RIM are calling it these days (B-Sphere anyone?), contact STS to evaluate your options.