Personal Information Manager (Blackberry) Usage Policy

Purpose

Personal Information Managers – PIMs – such as the Blackberry and the iPhone provide a way for people to wirelessly access email, calendar and other information sources. Since these devices connect and download information from the College’s email and other information servers, they both require some support from the IT staff, and their loss or misuse does introduce a new security risk.

Scope

The Support section of this policy applies to all College provided PIMs.

The User Responsibilities section applies to all PIMs, whether College provided or personally owned, which connect to the College’s email and information servers.

Support

The College will support the use of personal information managers when connecting to the Zimbra email / calendar system. This only devices supported are the Blackberry, Palm, and iPhone.

The College has contracted with Notify Technology Inc to provide a service which integrates the Blackberry or other PIM with the College’s Zimbra email system. The Faculty/Staff Help Desk will assist with setting up an account with Notify and with the initial configuration. This is the only support that the Help Desk will provide. Following that, all day to day support specific to the PIM connection and use with the College’s email systems will be provided by Notify.

Computer Services will cover the cost of the Notify service for the initial group of users. We will only cover devices which have been purchased by the College. We will recharge the applicable department for all new users after August 2008 $150 / year to cover the actual cost of the Notify service. For any user owned devices, it will be up to the department to agree to cover, via recharge, the $150 / year fee.

Policy:

User Responsibilities – Security:

* Password Protection: Protect your Blackberry or other device with a power-on password. The password should be at least 6 characters long and contain numbers and letters.

* Sensitive Information: Handheld devices should not be used to store passwords or other sensitive or proprietary information. They should never be used to store personally identifiable or private information (grades, sensitive emails, etc.) unless the information is encrypted.

* Reporting Loss / Automatic Data Deletion: Report a lost or stolen device to the Help Desk immediately. When this happens, we will issue an auto-destruct instruction that will wipe out the device the next time it is connected to the network.