Dear Blackberry community,
I hoping some on here can help [warning long post]. I’m looking for a corporate quality Blackberry Tracking system. I’ve been searching and trialling a few potentials but have not yet found something suitable. Below is a list of requirements, a little idealistic yes, but our reference barometer nonetheless from which we can make trade-offs.
- Tracking application that can run in background (with employee knowledge)
- Track employees a dozen or so times a day
- Web mapping interface for the management, able to collate/present phones in groups (in our case per department). Also view phone history between two dates/times
- Minimal drain on battery – Blackberries are already being used heavily
- Tracking information assurance – save data until it can be sent
- Tolerant of other uses of the phone e.g. making calls and accessing internet
- Ability to host our own service – phones talk to a server/database within our firewall
- Have a published API/service so we can integrate with our other corporate systems
- Scalable to 10’s of thousands of phones
- Support Blackberries with internal GPS and Bluetooth GPS ‘pucks’
- Support other phones also including Android G1 and Nokia
From our own research and looking over the various posts on this forum (and the FAQ item on same topic) most are free (not good for us as they close down and have no longevity), drain our batteries within 12 – 24 hours (constant tracking), unreliable crashing when doing other things (making calls), are heavy on data, provide very bad anomalies with coordinates (sometimes 100’s of miles away from actual locations, especially when in buildings) and none allow us to host the backend bit as we require for corporate use.
I’d be interest if anyone has first hand experience of a system they would recommend and I’ll investigate them further. We’ve looked at alternatives like bespoke tracking boxes that fit in your pocket but that’s just another device employees will carry, another mobile subscription and something else to charge!
Thanks in advance – I’ll still be searching…
Corporate quality Blackberry tracking
