We are recruiting a new member to our team and they have asked for a blackberry as their email device of choice, something we have never used before in house.  Having looked into this, it seems like a real can of worms.

What I would expect is that there is an easy way of connecting a zimbra server to a blackberry device using a protocol similar to IMAP or the nokia exchange server that I use on my E90 (works with Zimbra fine), but no, you have to have a separate windows box running a piece of blackberry middleware software that only connects to MSSQL type software, to which a special zimbra add on connects to .

What a faff, and I’m not doing this.  Blackberry have just lost a sale becasue the dont support Zimbra.  If you agree, consider signing this petition to ask RIM to natively support Zimbra.

In the meantime, I’m going to get a smartphone that does support zimbra like the HTC or nokia E90 we current use.