RIM issues End-of-Life notification for BlackBerry Management Center free service

Recently, registered users of BlackBerry Management Center free service received the End-of-Life notification for the said service.

Continue reading for more on the service, as well as the EOL notification.

BlackBerry® Management Center is a free, web-based service that provides a simple, more efficient way to manage and protect BlackBerry smartphones remotely. Designed for businesses with three to 100 employees, and for use with hosted email providers, BlackBerry Management Center supports both company and employee-owned devices.

The intuitive interface required little or no technical skills to use, so almost anyone could help support entire teams from almost anywhere. Its remote, centralized management helped make set up and troubleshooting of employee email easy and helped protect lost or stolen smartphones to ensure sensitive information didn’t fall into the wrong hands. In addition, with wireless backup and restore, users could get going quickly with new or replacement smartphones.

So what will happen to the free service?  Read RIM’s message below from the official EOL notification.

As we refocus our services offerings and product portfolio approaching the launch of the new BlackBerry®10 platform and devices, we wish to inform you as a registered user of BlackBerry® Management Center that this service will be discontinued as of January 10, 2013.

Effective January 10, 2013, the services and support of BlackBerry Management Center will no longer be accessible. You can still access wireless backup and restore, remote lock, locate, and wipe services for your BlackBerry smartphone using BlackBerry® Protect – a free service with an app you can download from BlackBerry App World™ or BlackBerry.com. For more information on BlackBerry Protect please visit www.blackberry.com/protect.

If you are subscribed to BlackBerry service, with access to email, you can set up your email account(s) using the Setup Wizard on your BlackBerry smartphone.

We’re very excited about BlackBerry 10, our new mobile platform, and as an existing BlackBerry customer, we’d like to keep you updated with the latest news and information as we approach the launch early next year. You can visit http://BlackBerry.com/BlackBerry10 and join the conversation with #BlackBerry10 on Twitter.

Thank you for your continued support.

Sincerely,
BlackBerry from Research In Motion Limited