Nice Office (for Blackberry)

Nice Office is a Blackberry app that promises to "turn your BB into a virtual office" by letting users sync calendar and contacts with an account created on the Nice Office web site, view journals (which track all phone calls, documents sent, and emails), manage mail accounts, upload documents, and dive into light CRM capabilities that lets users configure workflows; you can even perform a remote wipe of a Blackberry in case the device gets lost. For a small company that does not require a complex CRM solution, Nice Office is an affordable CRM and business productivity app.

Setup and Price
Nice Office is downloadable through Blackberry App World. While the app is free to download, you still need to setup a Nice Office Premium account. Premium accounts are $9.95 per month and provide the ability to add four mobile devices and 220 MB of storage space. Users can take it for a free test run for 30 days.

After installing on a Blackberry, users must register for an account at Nice Office's website. The website has a wizard that walks you through the initial steps of getting started. The first step is configuring a device. Nice Office supports not only Blackberry 4.2+, but also Android. The software also lists supported devices as the somewhat data Windows Mobile Pocket PC as well as Windows Mobile 5 and 6. Nice Office has a plug-in to support Office 2003 and Office 2007. Device configuration consists of selecting your device from the listings in the interface, and adding a pin and email account associated with the device.

Once I did this, I saw my Blackberry added in the interface, but when I tried to sync my phone with my Nice Office account, I received the error, "Please register your device." I was missing some steps as I found out after consulting the Nice Office knowledge base. I was emailed a file that I had to upload to my phone. This is a .jad file which allows the Blackberry to communicate with the Nice Office network servers. On Windows Mobile phones, the file is .cab. After uploading, I then had to manually sync my Blackberry Contacts and Calendar with Nice Office. Once these steps were completed, my device was registered and the Blackberry auto-synced with my Nice Office account. The fact that I needed to perform these additional steps after adding my device, was not made apparent within the setup wizard. I only found out what I had to do by going to the Nice Office knowledge base. So, the setup wizard does not walk you through the entire process of adding a device. In fact, users don't get much help in the Nice Office interface at all. After the setup wizard semi-walks you through initial setup, a rather confusing home screen opens and you are left to your own devices. The interface is navigable enough to weed your way through and get going, but a more thorough, guided setup would be preferable.

Features
Nice Office lets you view and manage work flow and status levels from the Blackberry. Viewing this information is handy for example, if you are out in the field and tracking the progress of a sales account. The syncing of contacts and calendar between the phone and the Nice Office account works well. By default, users are given a niceoffice.com email account, but you can manage any email account from the Nice Office interface. Nice Office supports SMTP and IMAP email servers. While its documentation stated that Hotmail is supported, Nice Office was unable to connect to my Hotmail account via IMAP. That may be because Hotmail uses POP3 instead, but I could not find any definitive information as to why I had a problem. I added my Gmail account which uses SMTP and IMAP with no problems.

You can actually do quite a lot in your account interface on the Nice Office web service, such as send email, documents and faxes directly to contacts. One feature missing however is a way to upload documents directly from the Blackberry to the Nice Office service and vice-versa. You can upload documents from your computer to the Nice Office web interface however.

The journaling feature logs activity of just about anything you do within Nice Office and can result in a very large and busy log file. By default, Nice Office journals all phone calls, documents sent and emails. This useful if you want to track activity, such as phones call you receive or make to clients. You can disable auto-journaling altogether on the Blackberry, but I did not find a way to select what to journal against and what not to, which would give a user more control.

Nice Office Maybe A Nice Choice
While I can see why the vendor touts this app as a "virtual office," better integration with at least word processing and spreadsheet apps would truly make this a complete virtual office. As it stands though, it's not a bad app to consider adding to your arsenal of business software, especially for users always on the go, but I would definitely try it out before buying to see if it is of benefit for your business.