The move to Good Technology Inc.'s GoodLink service was less about RIM's recent patent battle with NTP Inc. and more because of a wider range of function offered by GoodLink, said Claude Fossati, worldwide voice telecom manager for Thomson. Santa Clara, Calif.-based Thomson provides technology and services to the media and entertainment industries.

About 200 BlackBerry users at the company were moved off the RIM service; Now, more than 1,000 have Palm Treo 650, Pocket PC and smartphone devices running GoodLink, Fossati said today.

He said the primary reason for the switch to GoodLink was to offer more than simple e-mail to users, who will benefit from using Outlook, an application that they don't need training on. GoodLink also offers enhancements to provide better storage and security, giving users access to Word documents from their devices and the ability to put all the data on flash storage cards.

"A part of the change was what would happen with all those RIM devices" if the patent lawsuit led to a RIM shutdown, Fossati said. "The future was not certain."

If a similar lawsuit were to shut down the GoodLink service, Fossati said he feels a