BlackBerry Hacks

Chapter 8. The Web and MDS

Hacks 85–93: Introduction

One of the most significant innovations in RIM’s short history is the addition of the BlackBerry Browser to the operating system. In combination with the BlackBerry Enterprise Server’s Mobile Data Service (MDS), instantly unlocked entire intranets along with mountains of rich corporate data made them available to the mobile user. As BlackBerry users catch on and start using the BlackBerry Browser, they’ll quickly find room for improvement in your intranet.

Corporate networks are chock-full of lazily coded FrontPage web sites that were designed for ancient versions of Internet Explorer viewed with large monitors. How could those web developers have known their sites would one day be viewed on a mobile device from anywhere? To make those sites viewable on the BlackBerry, some sites will require minor tweaks [Hack #88] . For others, it might be easier to start from scratch. For especially time-sensitive data, you can push it [Hack #90] to your users’ BlackBerry devices.

Control Access to Certain Sites

If your company uses a proxy server, don’t tell MDS about it.

When the Mobile Data Service was first released with BlackBerry Enterprise Server Version 3.5, it had poor support for proxy servers. You couldn’t configure it with an auto-proxy, which a lot of companies use to provide Internet access to users. At that time, you could only configure the server to either use a proxy for all HTTP requests or use a proxy for none. There wasn’t ...