4. The BlackBerry Mobile Data System (MDS)

As explained in Chapter 3, “The Connected BlackBerry,” BlackBerry applications can use different paths to the servers hosting the data they need. What’s special about the BlackBerry platform’s capabilities for Enterprise Applications is that, with BlackBerry, you can access your company’s internal applications on your BlackBerry devices without unnecessarily exposing components of your environment to security risks from the Internet or malicious users. This capability, the BlackBerry Enterprise Applications special sauce, is provided by the BlackBerry Mobile Data System (MDS) and is the topic for this chapter.^[1]

^[1] Many BlackBerry users, administrators, and even developers think that any application running on a BlackBerry device or accessing internal (inside of the firewall) data is an “MDS application,” but this is not true. There is MDS (a component of the BES) and BlackBerry applications—there’s no such thing as an MDS application.