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:

Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) – Java Upgrade Caveats

 Be very careful when upgrading Java on a Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES).  The Blackberry Collaboration Service and the Blackberry MDS Connection Service may not start up properly.  Fortunately, this is an easy fix:

Blackberry Web Desktop Manager

I am currently testing the Blackberry Web Desktop Manager v 1.0.0 and it seems pretty good.  I have yet to see if I can upgrade Blackberry handheld OSs using it.  I would be interested to hear from other people who have used it.

Wireless Reconcile Missing in Blackberry’s Email Reconciliation Options

We recently had an issue with a Blackberry that two options were not appearing in the Email Reconcilation options under Messaging: On Conflict and Wireless Reconcile. Usually the fix is:

1) Go to Main Screen –> Options–> [Advanced Options] (if necc.) –> Service Books and delete Desktop [CMIME]

2) Either connect your Blackberry to your desktop if you have Desktop Manager and the Handheld software installed or have the BES administrator Re-send the Service Books to you.

After I could not get this to work, I called RIM. We tried a Security Wipe on the Blackberry, removed user from the BES and going through the Enterprise Activation to no avail. We used the low level format program Javaloader.exe to format the Blackberry and did the same to the same results. The final resolution was kind of scary. RIM suggested to bring down the BES and rename and remove the BlackberryProfiles.nsf from the server and restart the server. The BlackberryProfile database gets rebuilt and the Service Books got pushed down.

Fun with DST

Oh, boy! Aren’t we having fun with the Daylight Saving Time (DST) issue? The agents for Lotus Notes are going to be released in the version 4 by close of business today. In order to patch for the DST issue, you need to apply a Windows server patch, a Windows desktop patch and run an agent to fix the bad entries in the address book between March 11 and April 1 (2am) and October 28th and November 4th (2am). We have been testing both Windows Server 2000 and 2003 as well as Windows 2000 and XP. so far we have the patches on the server and the client on both and now we just need to run the agent on the test mail file to see if it corrects the entries. The issue in Lotus Notes is that the display of the Notes calendar entries appear an hour later than were originally scheduled. For example, a meeting scheduled for March 14 for 7am appears in the Calendar view for 8am, but when you open the entry, it still says 7am. The agent is supposed to modify all entries within those dates. I plan on running it as a background task if possible.

Blackberrys are in the same boat.  We are on server 4.0.3 and need to be on 4.0.6 or 4.1.1 in order to relably push out the forthcoming patch to the smart phones.

Sametime 7.5 needs to be patched, but previous versions do not have to be.

So I am having fun.  Nothing like waiting for the last minute to roll out these fixes.

Password Keeper and Restoring Entries

We had an issue with Password Keeper on our Blackberrys where we had done a backup of the entire Blackberry handheld and wiped the data clean off the device. We had also, due to some troubleshooting issues, had removed the user from the server. We found we could not restore the Password Keeper entries back onto the device. We had two separate solutions:

1) Go into Password Keeper and select Options from the menu and turn off Wireless Synchronization. At this point you can restore the entries. Then turn the Wireless Synchronization back on.

2) We tried to do the same thing on another device, but Wireless Synchronization wasn’t an option. RIM had us go into the Options from the main screen and go into Service Books and delete the Desktop [SYNC] service. Once that was done, you can restore the entries. Then go back into Service Books and choose Undelete.

The Desktop [SYNC] service deals with all the synchronization of calendar items, memo items, etc. If you have any issues restoring and don’t have Wireless Synchronization as an option, try deleting the service book, restoring the items and then undeleting the service book.

 

[UPDATE – 2/4/2009] I just noticed in the Options of Password Keeper that there is a Wireless Synchronization.  When was that added??  Must have been recently.