Blackberry and SBS
Well, I've spent the better part of several days trying to connect my first Blackberry to an SBS server. After trying to do it on my own, I finally contacted Cingular/Blackberry (BB) support. Here's the lowdown (aftere I first do some venting) --
VENTING: It must be SOP that Cingular puts you on hold for 45 minutes before you ever talk to a human being. By the 3rd day, I was almost getting use to the drone of their pre-recorded messages. After talking to front line people twice, I finally got patched over to a true BB support person (in Canada, naturally) today. I literally was on the phone from 10:30am until 2pm --- all for a single Blackberry!!!!
SETUP: I have a single BB 7290, and I was trying to use the BB redirector/desktop software to sync up email and contacts. I was told by BB that it should work without my having to forward incoming emails out to the BB via Exchange. Yea, right. Well, I couldn't make it work unless otherwise.
Today, with BB tech support with me on the phone, we totally reconfigured my redirector/desktop, stopped Exchange form forwarding the email, and got everything to work.
SOLUTION: Part of the problem is that the BB desktop/redirector does NOT work well with Cached Exchange mode. So they had me setup a second MAPI profile in Outlook, with cached mode disabled, and used that profile to configure the desktop/redirector. It didn't work right away, but I could here him typing furiously on his keyboard, and lo and behold, the emails started to fly.
CONCLUSIONS: Why, you may ask, was I on the phone so long? Answer: 1 hour wait /on hold, 1 houre to walk me tru uninstalling / reinstalling / and configuring both the BB and the software, and then 1.5 hours to work on the BB locking up when I was trying to sync up to my public contact folder. Yes, my public contact folder! I was thrilled when I heard they supported it -- without my having to copy the contaxcts to a temporary folder under my Inbox.
Unfortunately somewhere between the desktop softwar,e the USB cable, and the BB phone itself, it kept freezing up. Finally found out that there was a KB article that lock ups may occur if trying to *only* sync up a Public folder. Onmce included syncing up an empty person contact folder, the syncing and uploading worked like a charm.
Well, that's my experience. Let's see how things are working on Monday!