BlackBerry Gets Microsoft Office 365 Cloud E-Mail Support

Research In Motion (RIM) has launched the open beta of BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365, a hosted service aimed at the midmarket that extends Microsoft Exchange Online messaging to the BlackBerry smartphone. As an added bonus, this new BlackBerry cloud service comes with a self-service portal so organizations can manage their own deployment.

The press release confirms that BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365 is open to managed service providers, systems integrators, resellers — basically anyone who handles BlackBerry deployments on behalf of a customer.

Here’s RIM’s list of features of the new service:

In other words, BlackBerry is looking to extend its total domination of corporate e-mail to Microsoft’s cloud while simultaneously leveraging its own investments in cloud-based device management. And credit where credit’s due: Since BlackBerry launched its first consumer cloud offering, I’ve been wondering when RIM would bring the functionality to a core enterprise segment. And now it looks like it has.

BlackBerry Business Cloud Services is open to Microsoft Office 365 Midsized Businesses and Enterprises plan subscribers, and works with devices on business or consumer data plans.