During the Blackberry Technical Seminar 2007, it was announced that the next update to Blackberry Enterprise Server, v.4.1.5 – will be released in Q1 2008. Initial release date was this month, I guess there has been some delays.

The nifty features are:

1. Rich Content Email Rendering
– Finally you can view HTML emails, along with external content

2. Remote Email Search and Download
– Similar to Exchange 2007 / Windows Mobile 6 combo, you can search, download emails that are not local on device. This feature was an important one, as many of
us do not have all our mailboxes in our handheld. It will help a lot. (if you are anxious to have it, you can use a third party solution, Webmessenger Desktop Search integrates with X1 and allows you to search/retrieve from your Blackberry).

3. Free/Busy Lookup
– You can view availability of attendees for a meeting.

4. Native File Attachments
– Now that many BB devices support storage cards, you can finally download and save attachments to your storage cards and later on you can transfer them to your desktop, etc. Imagine someone sending you your missing presentation, you save it on BB, copy it to your no network connected laptop and you continue with your presentation.

5. Measure overall health of BES Server
– Monitoring, reporting, alerting options. All thanks to recent purchase of NeedTxt.

The features are interesting and will surely make your BB life easier. I wonder, why they chose this many updates to be a part of point of a point update (4.1.4 -> 4.1.5). And on another note, all client side features will require device software to be 4.3.1 or