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Corporate BlackBerrys to get Google Apps syncing

If you've got a company-issued BlackBerry and your company subscribes to Google Apps, you could soon receive push e-mail and find global contacts on your phone.

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If your office has given you a BlackBerry for work purposes, you may soon be accessing your Google Apps Gmail, calendar, and contacts via the BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

On Friday, Google announced that some functionality in Google Apps, its suite of premium enterprise-level applications, will now give company-issued BlackBerrys some push and sync functionality.

The Google Apps Connector promises to push Gmail messages within 60 seconds, and sync in-box actions like assigning labels and archiving messages. You'll also be able to search contacts from the company's global address list, a huge bonus for mobile workers. Synchronization between the Google Calendar and the BlackBerry calendar is one-way in this release, with Google's calendar populating your schedule on the phone. Google plans to include bidirectional calendar syncing in the future.

While the connector opens up syncing to some of the Google Apps, in this iteration it does not sync with Google Docs, the intranet site-hosting app called Google Site, and Google Video. You'll still be able to view content through the mobile browser, however.

The Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server (download) is available for free to corporate Google Apps Premier and Education Editions customers, and must be implemented by an IT administrator.

Check out more details in this Google blog post.

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