March 01, 2006 IT Group Urges Moratorium In Blackberry Shutdown By W. David Gardner Courtesy of Page 1 of 2 With many of its more than 3,000 members anxious about a threatened shutdown of Research in Motion's services, the Society of Information Management (SIM) is urging a six-month moratorium to give users an opportunity to implement alternative solutions. "Even in the best of situations, we're looking at a few weeks," said Drew Farris, VP and CIO at Iron Age Corp., in an interview Wednesday. "It definitely could be weeks of downtime and it would be a fairly traumatic event for us." Iron Age, which markets safety shoes, has more than 100 Blackberries in use and they are crucial to the firm's maintenance and support services. Although the 188-year-old firm operates many brick-and-mortar stores, it also has 100 mobile stores operating from trucks. With capability on the trucks and important maintenance and service requirements, Farris notes that Iron Age's customer base is very technology-savvy. Farris says he has instituted a contingency plan to acquire Treo handhelds if U.S. District Court Judge James R. Spencer issues an order that could result in the shutdown of the Blackberry service. In complex patent litigation, Research in Motion lost a jury trial to patent trolling company NTP Inc., which seeks hundreds of millions of dollars from RIM. Farris said the six-month moratorium sought by SIM should be enough time for IT managers to cope if RIM's service is required to be shutdown. SIM prepared a filing for Judge Spencer, but no new arguments including SIM's were accepted. In the filing, SIM said: "A cease and desist injunction allowing fewer than six months for execution would render thousands of businesses unable to conduct business in the normal course. It would create a run on alternative products that the current marketplace cannot meet." E-mail This Story Print This Story Page 2: next page Page 1 | 2 Get the latest Messaging news, product info, and trends every week.			Ignoring E-Mail Is A Sure Way To Lose Business PayPal To Offer Paying By Text Message Yahoo Expands VoIP Service In U.S. Novell Launches Linux 10, Mobile Server The High Cost Of Data Loss Bluetooth's Mobile Handshake     Messaging Pipeline's Main RSS Feed     Messaging Pipeline's Blog RSS Feed Editorial and vendor perspectives The Six Flavors Of Windows Vista Microsoft plans to release a full six-pack of Vista versions, one for every taste. Which Vista will be right for you? Hope is Not Enough When It Comes To Compliance Three Ways To Authenticate E-Mail And Stop Spam Wikis In The Workplace Review: Google Desktop 3 Vendors are now talking about how collaboration can be improved by integrating video with messaging applications. They're even talking about adding live TV to mobile phones. How far do you go before it becomes a bandwidth and business productivity drain? Video is a great idea     13% Video is fine but there needs to be size limits     25% It's never used for anything really productive     38% I draw the line at live TV     25% In search of messaging products? Check out our brand new Product Finder for a directory of groupware and collaboration tools, security products, archiving solutions, and more.