BlackBerry® Enterprise Service 10

[mfhall]

Great!  Like many BES Admins, this is the long awaited version with the ability to sync with Exchange 2007 Public Folders.  I haven't found/read the details or limitations of this ability yet but just curious if anyone has had some difficulties/comments like it changing a contact syncs only works sometimes or not at all.  Or and address line on device is garbled or duplicated, etc.

[bbhorrigan]

Well you would need handheld device OS 5.0 to be able to sync with public folders which isn't publicly available yet. In my beta testing, it works pretty slick though.

[mfhall]

Good to know that with the BB OS it works great.  I guess it works with 4.6 but not all the way?  Anyway, any idea on when v5 OS will be available?

Thanks

[bbhorrigan]

I've heard Nov of this year, but no confirmed date. The idea is, give them BES 5.0 now, let people get in it in place, then release the handheld OS, so that people can use those features. That way when people hear about the new features, BES 5.0 could already be in place. All it takes is one exeuctive to want a feature to get your company upgraded.

[Zervo]

this is the second post I saw here regarding Blackberry and public folders.  We have been doing this for six months now

If you want to wireless connect your Blackberry to public folders, you can right now.  We are using an Exchange Add on called

Add2Exchange which I think is pretty slick. It doesn't directly connect to Public folders though, it replicates to and from them

It basically allows you to see public folders by copying information from the public folder into the private folders, and then letting the wireless connect sync.  The relationships you set up can be private to private for an executive and sec, pub to private and private to public, and are pretty flexible. 

We set up several relationships where you edit an calendar task or contact item on the blackberry and then let it sync back to the public.  This is how we use it but you can also just have the info flow only one way.  If they delete an item, it can be set not to come back or recopy it.  It is pretty pricy for their top enterprise model, but the Standard (read "Lite") did what we wanted it to do.

We are going to upgrade this week because they now have Gal sync with pictures - so when the users call on the mobile, you can see their face.  Way cool.  We don't use that option yet, but I saw it work.  (skeptical as I am)

There is no garbling of info, but I will tell you you have to spend some time figuring out what kind of relationship you want.  The manual is a book... but we finally found the place there that told us.  Tech support is ok, but we messed it up originally and we had to pay a hundred bucks for them to fix it.  Now that I have read the manual and understand what we were doing, it was actually pretty simple.... but again, I suggest reading before you install. 

Right now we have the Private to public, so the way the sales manager uses it is if our salesmen make a new contact, a copy gets put in a public so we end up sending blasts to them and we "own the info".  I think even when BB can natively see the public folders, this "data mining" or architecture  will be hard to live without.

Someone said public folders were on their way out, and sharepoint is replacing it, I think BB better get on that!  I did some research witn MS and public folders will be here to 2016 - at least.

I checked my BB and the company is www.diditbetter.com.  my rep is Dave and he understands what we were trying to do and helped us get through the first part.

hope this helps.

Z