Blackberry Enterprise Activating Troubleshooting

 Invariably, if you have been a Blackberry Administrator for any amount of time, you have gotten some Enterprise Activation issues where the device doesn’t fully activate, or it activates but the address book is not populated.  Here are some troubleshooting tips which I am compiling here:

1)  Make sure that the Blackberry is on and has a signal.  With Verizon, you should have 1XEV with any OS level 4.1 and above.  Perform a *228 with Verizon and wait for the recorded voice to say “press 1 to program your phone” finish the recording and then press 1 to program your phone.  If any errors, call Verizon technical support to have them take a look at the provisioning of the Blackberry and see if they may have transposed the electronic serial number (ESN).  After the programming, go to Options –> Advanced Options –> Host Routing Table.  Get the menu and choose Register Now (This should work with any carrier).

2)  Try to do the Over-The-Air (OTA) Enterprise Activation by typing the Internet address of the user and the Enterprise Activation password or connect the Blackberry to your machine and use the Blackberry Manager to Assign Device to the user (which will also provision it)

3)  If the Enterprise Activation was successful, but you are not getting any calendar, address book, memos or tasks, go to the Blackberry Manager, find the user and double click on their entry.  Go to PIM Sync and whichever module is not coming down, put the server name in canonical order (CN=…/OU…/O=…) and the path to the mail file.  Then go to the Blackberry and go to Options –> Advanced Options –> Service Books and Delete the Desktop [SYNC] service book.  Wait 10 seconds.  Get the menu back and choose Undelete.  This will start a sync and should pull down the entries. 

4)   If the syncing is stuck on a percentage, in Lotus Notes, open the person’s mailbox and do a Shift-Control-F9 to rebuild all the indexes or open the database while holding the Shift-Control keys.  If you are having an issue with:

Address Book:  Open the (iNotesContacts) or ($Contacts) view

Memos:  Open the ($Journal) View

Tasks: Open the To Do View

Inbox: Open the Inbox View

… Then press Shift-F9 to rebuild that view.

4)  Try reloading the OS software by clicking on the device in the Local Ports (Device Management) and select Load Handheld or Load Handheld-Interactive (I prefer the Interactive since I am able to turn off languages and add some modules).

5)  If all else fails, do a security wipe on the Blackberry (options –> Security Options –> General Options –> get the menu and choose Security Wipe), delete the entry on the BES and make sure the State database is gone (In Domino it is under BES\State).  Recreate the user and do an Enterprise Activation.  

This should activate them. Go through the above steps and hopefully that should work.