The BIS 3.0 upgrade was successful over the weekend, although at first glance you wouldn't know it. The update is complete, but it sadly didn't bring along all the features we were expecting (Gmail two-way sync for one). North American users noted a gap in emails early Sunday morning, and as everyone was waking up they were surely trying to figure out if the upgrade had indeed gone through. Some features did show up however like the ability to add and delete labels via the Gmail Plugin, as well as OpenDocument support, but two-way sync for Gmail is still just a myth for now (but its said to be rolling out throughout the spring). Hit the jump for the full details of the upgrade, and be sure to drop a comment and let us know your thoughts.

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Since our support email inbox is filling up with folks letting us know, we figured we better post this up as a reminder for anyone out there that might have missed it the first time around.

• There will be scheduled network maintenance by Research In Motion (RIM) affecting BIS customers between 0100 CT / 0200 EDT on March 28th and 0500 CT / 0600 EDT on March 28th.
• Blackberry will be performing a BlackBerry Internet Service v2.8 upgrade to BlackBerry Internet Service v3.0
• BlackBerry Internet Service subscribers may be unable to send or receive messages using their BlackBerry hosted email account or integrated third-party email accounts, view email attachments, activate email service, or request to see ""more"" text during the maintenance.
• Wireless service providers and device resellers may be unable to create subscriber accounts or provision services for subscribers.
• The estimated duration of impact is 4 hours and affects 100% of BIS customers.

Keep this in mind if you happen to be awake and find your BlackBerry not working as it should be. Hopefully things will go as planned and when everyone wakes up the issues will have been cleared up.

• Click Here To Read More About The BIS 3.0 Upgrade Features>>

As expected, Research In Motion has been sending out scheduled maintenance notifications to admins and carriers as they prepare to roll BIS 3.0 to North American users (view BIS 3.0 feature doc). Dates and timeframes are as follows, so you can all prepare for the inevitable loss of data connections:

• There will be scheduled network maintenance by Research In Motion (RIM) affecting BIS customers between 0100 CT / 0200 EDT on March 28th and 0500 CT / 0600 EDT on March 28th.
• Blackberry will be performing a BlackBerry Internet Service v2.8 upgrade to BlackBerry Internet Service v3.0
• BlackBerry Internet Service subscribers may be unable to send or receive messages using their BlackBerry hosted email account or integrated third-party email accounts, view email attachments, activate email service, or request to see ""more"" text during the maintenance.
• Wireless service providers and device resellers may be unable to create subscriber accounts or provision services for subscribers.
• The estimated duration of impact is 4 hours and affects 100% of BIS customers. 

Even with 100% of all BIS customers without data, the real overall impact shouldn't be that bad. Considering most normal people sleep during the timeframe anyways. If all goes well, when ya get up we should have some BIS 3.0 action going on. Thanks to all those who sent this in.

*Update: We got our hands on an official email from RIM, and it looks like BIS 3.0 is set to drop on March 21st. Hit the jump for the details.*

Seems like we won't have to wait much longer for the next BIS rollout. While some will be happy and some will walk away unimpressed BIS 3.0 is coming at some point followed up by BIS 3.1 as well. Details about the two new BIS offerings have been anything less then short as we already have covered the details in previous posts. As expected, the BIS 3.0 rollout was to come in early 2010 and March seems to fit that bill just right provided RIM keeps target.

The good folks over at BerryReview have posted the possibility of a roll out coming as soon as next week that is, if RIM plans on keeping their rumored internal release date. While we can't say with 100% certainty this will happen, it does indeed seem plausible at this point. You excited for the BIS 3.0 options or is it something that will pretty much go unnoticed? I mean, they are great additions but OpenOffice support alongside WMA support coupled with GMail 2 way synch for read/unread status isn't exactly on par with the likes of say the new webkit browser by any means. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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