Still Buggy

It seems like every time they fix something in this app they break something else. Now (as of November 20, version 1.0.22474.320) I cant play the .wav files that our Cisco voicemail system forwards to me. This used to work fine.

Much of my commentary below still applies. Incidentally, supposedly Touch ID is back, but the app says we have a setting on our end that doesnt allow it. Our IT people disagree. Sigh. At least they finally introduced iOS 9 support.

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The September 9 update (1.0.21391.203) retains some of the long-outstanding buggy behaviour, such as the inability to handle exceptions to recurring appointments properly. (See below for the workaround, which involves making sure the exception invitations and replies are not kept in any email folder that Work Connect will sync.)

The bigger problem right now, as others have noted, is an apparently lack of iOS 9 compatibly. I have not tested this myself, but I got an email from our IT department today warning us not to update our iPhones to iOS 9, lest our corporate email stop working. Like someone else here said, its possible for third party enterprise software providers to release stable iOS apps, so get your act together Blackberry. (One note to that person—you can indeed turn of email delete confirmations. Its in the app settings.)

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The July 8 update (1.0.20573.105) fixed the problem with seeing email in folders (whew!), but dropped Touch ID. Im guessing they had to do some kind of emergency rollback to an earlier version of the code while they worked out the more serious problem.

Overall the app does what its supposed to—mostly. But its buggy.

One thing I didnt mention in my original review below is that the calendar gets easily confused when there are exceptions to recurring events. Meetings that show up in Outlook sometimes dont show up in Work Connect, which is kind of bad. It seems to be caused when the app processes one-off changes and cancellations that it finds in your email, which easily happens if you change the Mail Days to Sync setting to sync more than the default 3 days of past emails (I use No Limit). So, for example, I have a team meeting every week. Sometimes my boss cancels one. After that cancellation email is processed by Work Connect *all* of the occurrences of that meeting either disappear from my calendar or are marked as cancelled, instead of just the one that was cancelled!

There is a workaround to this problem: Remove those cancellation emails from your Inbox, and your Sent and Deleted Items folders, as soon as they are created. You can either permanently delete them, or do what I do – drag them into a folder that is not set to sync in Work Connect, and which you will not open in Work Connect. Then delete your email account (Settings > General > [choose the account] > Remove Account) and set it up again. This always works to force the calendar to rebuild itself, as long as you have first removed those meeting exception emails from any folders that Work Connect will open. (This problem has existed for at least as long as Ive been using Work Connect, which is 11 months. I retested it today (July 10, 2015) in version 1.0.20573.105 and the problem is still there. The workaround still works.)

Previous review below.

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This app has always been buggy, but theyve been improving it gradually over the last year.

The June 24 update adds Touch ID so you dont need to enter your workspace password, but it breaks something far more important—the ability to see email saved in any folders! Thats right; if you navigate to a folder that is not one that normally syncs (so, by default, any folder other than Inbox or Sent Items), and you the drag down to force a synchronization of that folder, nothing happens! One step forward, two steps back.

There is a workaround: In Settings, set the folder you want to see to synchronize. But thats a bad workaround, as you might not want to have a bunch of folders always syncing, and the ad-hoc method of forcing a sync on one folder only (by pulling down) used to work (like, before this week).

Overall, while its getting better, Work Connect still lacks the stability and polish of the native iOS mail and calendar apps (and thats saying something, because the native iOS 8 calendar app is a bit buggy itself). I wish my employer would just allow me to use the native apps instead of this buggy BlackBerry mess. But on the other hand its kind of nice to have work all in its own separate place where its easy to ignore when Im off the clock.

Which reminds me—push notifications dont work for email in Work Connect, but Im grateful for that. [Update 29 Jul 15: This is not correct. Push email actually works. It turns out it was a server setting at our work place. Sorry for the error.]

(And push notifications for calendar items are buggy. I still get alerts for items that have been deleted from the calendar. [Still happens in 1.0.20573.105.])

chcn about Work Connect for BES12, v1.0.22474.