Looking to keep its position in an increasingly competitive landscape, Research in Motion (RIM) announced Tuesday new e-mail and other features for its popular BlackBerry device.

The company based in Waterloo, Ontario, said the new features, unveiled at the Lotusphere 2008 conference in Orlando, Fla., and scheduled for release throughout the first half of this year, will “enable organizations to increase mobility, productivity and return on investment.” The features include enhanced messaging and collaboration, simpler management, enhanced security, and expanded application development support.

E-mail, Lotus Connections

The features require updates to the BlackBerry Enterprise Server and device software, and offer new capabilities for document downloading and editing, remote searching for messages, easier calendar lookup, HTML and rich-text e-mail, and advanced instant messaging. RIM has also announced that it will preview today a native application for providing access to Lotus Connections social software for businesses, offering the same access that is currently available on the desktop.

For documents in formats such as Microsoft’s Word, PowerPoint and Excel, the integration of the DataViz Documents to Go software will enable editing on a BlackBerry smartphone. E-mail searching has been enhanced to allow users to search and retrieve messages from the server, even when they are no longer available on the smartphone.

With the new calendar functionality, users can check colleagues’ availability before requesting a meeting. For instant communications, companies running IBM Lotus Sametime and Microsoft Live Communications Server can have improved address-book integration, “click to call” functionality and more emoticon support.

Enhanced Administration

New BlackBerry administration features include an enhanced Monitoring Service as part of the next release of the company’s Enterprise Server. A new Web Desktop Manager simplifies software upgrades, the company said, by allowing users to install software on their computer and manage their device via a browser. In addition, software updates to the device can be handled…