Research In Motion (RIM) announced BlackBerry® Business Cloud Services in conjunction with Microsoft Office 365. This is a new  could based hosting service for medium businesses and bigger companies to in essence extends Microsoft Exchange Online onto BlackBerry® smartphones.  What this does is let businesses to manage their own MS 365 deployments on the cloud. RIM launched an beta service for this in over 30 countries.

This follows the recent way of Cloud based service announcement from competitors like Apple that have launched their iCloud service. There is also DropBox which is growing very fast. And there are other offerings from Microsoft SkyDrive services. What everyone is trying to achieve here is a seamless transition between devices, wether you are working on your PC, Blackberry® PlayBook™ tablet or your BlackBerry® Torch™ smartphone. If you are working on a Microsoft 365 program, then you should be able to continue where you left off on another device.

The key features of the service are:

• Microsoft Exchange Online email, calendar and organizer data
• BlackBerry® Balance™ technology –  this presents a unified view of work and personal content on a BlackBerry smartphone but  keeps the content separate and secure.
• Web-based console for IT administrators to provision, manage and secure BlackBerry smartphones remotely.
• Online access to employee self-service smartphone security functions.
• Use of cloud service to manage BlackBerry deployments on behalf of customers.

Many big corporations and even US government agencies have already experienced the service, with many more businesses getting ready to begin using it. The cloud-based service has no extra cost if you already subscribe to a Microsoft Office 365 plan.