Last month, BlackBerry released updates to BBM for Android and BBM for BlackBerry 10.
The company has now followed that up with an update for iOS users, which is primarily for users who are using BBM Protected.
BBM brings you together in the moment with friends and family through instant chats, voice calls, picture sharing, voice notes and more.
What’s New:
BBM
- users can now set a subject for a multi-person chat
- minor enhancements and bug fixes
BBM Protected
- Team Chats: BBM Protected now allows organizational teams to take advantage of context-specific, secure BBM collaboration sessions. By assigning a subject to the Team Chat session, team members can keep track of what’s important, stay productive and enhance what they can accomplish. This is a key capability for regulated industries like healthcare, enabling doctors and other providers to securely share information about patients to improve care, or in financial services, allowing wealth managers to communicate clients financial data with support staff to enhance client service and satisfaction.
- High Priority Messages: BBM Protected users can tag important BBM Protected Messages within a conversation as High Priority messages, ensuring they are not missed. High Priority messages are marked in red text to signify their importance, allowing users to identify that the message contains an action item that needs to be immediately acted upon. High Priority messages promote BBM Protected users to action upon critical communication situations, to generate more productive outcomes when it matters most.
- Delivered and Read Notifications Available in Multi-Person Chats: BBM Protected users can now see exactly who has read or has received a BBM Protected message when communicating with multiple individuals. This enhancement to Multi-Person Chats helps improve secure communications by enabling enhanced engagement within, between and outside of organizational teams.
- IT Administrator Policy: Restrict Copy and Paste. There are some communications that are for certain eyes only. Now IT administrators can protect the security of those messages by restricting company employees from using copy and paste functionalities within a BBM Chat through the Enterprise Identity by BlackBerry IT Admin Console. This added security layer prevents data leakage and ensures that an organization’s information & data stays within a given organization or group of people.
These new enhancements for BBM Protected are an integral part of updates to BlackBerry’s enterprise software portfolio under the Good Secure EMM Suites portfolio. This also includes the integration of Good and WatchDox products into BlackBerry’s multi-OS enterprise mobility management (EMM) solution, BES12.
“BBM Protected is synergistic to the privacy and protection offered by the Good Secure EMM Suites in providing the privacy and protection to data at rest or data in transit, with the end-to-end protection that BBM Protected offers for secured messaging,” said Herman Li, Senior Vice President, BBM Software Development.
Chat with friends on Android, BlackBerry and iPhone:
- BBM is always on and always connected – no app to open
- Know when messages have been delivered (D’s) and read (R’s)
- Say ‘hello’ with BBM Voice – free voice calling between BBM Contacts
- Quickly share photos, files, documents, voice notes and more
- Allow contacts to view your location live on a map, powered by Glympse
- See when contacts are responding to your message
- Emoticons for every mood and emotion let you express yourself
BBM lets you protect your privacy. You control it:
- You chose how to share your information: BBM uses PINs instead of phone numbers or email addresses so that it’s more private and you always control who can contact you
- You chose your contacts: 2-way opt-in means you have control over who is able to message you
Chat and Share with many at once: - Groups: BBM groups help you share pictures, lists and appointments with group members. You can even be in a group with people who aren’t part of your own BBM contact list.
- Multi-person chats: Invite multiple contacts to have a chat together.
- Broadcast messages: Send a message to multiple BBM contacts at one time.
- BBM Channels: Join conversations happening now about the things you love.
- Create a new channel to share your thoughts, ideas and passions.
- Subscribe to an existing BBM channel to join chats with others who share your interests.
- Create your own BBM profile:
- Post a profile picture using images, pictures or even animated pictures (GIFs).
- Update your status to let people know what you’re up to or how you feel
