BlackBerry® Enterprise Solution

[kipd1]

Sorry if this has already been asked, I'm not sure exactly what to search for and what I did yielded nothing.  I have a user with an 8330 who would like our companies global contact list on his phone.  Is this possible?  I advised him that hey can use the lookup feature to search through Exchange's Directory of contacts, but he wanted them all automatically on the phone.  I briefly browsed through some BES settings, but did not find any that sounded like they would accomplish this.  Also, if the BES is unable to do it, is there a way I can automatically add all contacts from the global contact list on the Exchange server to his outlook desktop contacts so that when the BES wirelessly syncs, it grabs all the users contacts?  Thanks.

[knottyrope]

here is what we did

Our soulution was to Keep a personnel list in publicfolders and add to each contact a category called personnel list.
Then show each BB user how to sort by category in their contacts folder.
Then they can delete the old entries via category and copy over the personell list to contacts once a month.
Also you can tell the BB to lookup via group of personnel list or whatever categories they have.

Not the best solution but it works very well offline for BB and windows mobile.
This also teaches the user how to better manage their contacts via categories.

Also we have outlook do lookups in the personell list (copy to favorites and enable address book) and not use GAL.
HR can manage it easier from a public folder too.


How users update:
goto contacts
View arrange by category
Delete catagory personnel list

Goto public folders/personnel list
highlight first user
press ctrl a
Drag drop into contact folder

is this easy enough?
80+ users here can handle it.

Message Edited by knottyrope on 03-30-2009 10:39 PM

[HighRoad]

Hey kipd1,

You should save the GAL to a .PST file and then use Desktop Manager to sync the GAL to the BlackBerry. KB02444 may help.

[knottyrope]

No offense, Highroads example is good, however having all the users deal with pst files, desktop manager, intelli sync, configure PIM correctly, etc will knot be fun in the long run.

Using his method for you to populate a public folder and for you to maintain it would be good solution and use my method for users to be kept up to date should be a easier way of doing things and less burden on the end users.

[HighRoad]

All good points but lets not forget one of the biggest reasons for the lookup feature... so you don't have to store what could be a huge amount of frequently changing data to the BlackBerry databases. Having the GAL on the device makes some apps easier to use etc... but ultimately the better solution is the one that works best for you

I have chunks of my GAL sync'd via Desktop Manager on my device for use with Vlingo and use lookup for everything else

[kipd1]

Hey guys, thanks for the responses.  Sorry it has taken me so long to respond to your suggestions, I have been very busy with other issues and have advised the user to use his lookup until I had time to look things over.  I will give the suggestions a try and post back once I can confirm what worked.  Thanks again.

[knottyrope]

huge chunks? with a big corporation with 1000's of users I can see it will be an issue eventually

Our company contatcs size now is 900k with 300 contacts here and 80+ users syncing their pesonnel list

 twice a month or less is not doing much performance wise on my system.

Guy yesterday activated with 3000+ contacts. only took a few min to sync.

Maybe it dues to having decent hardware or not too many users, but it currently works for me.

[bbhorrigan]

I think you should give users the look up feature and that's it, but I think at this point we are debating the "points" of doing it over the usefulness of it. I deal with BES domain's that have thousands and thousands of users. I am never going to give any user the option of pushing 20k GAL contacts to the BlackBerry, not only is it pointless, but it just letting the user get away with being a little bit lazy. At that point, you are looking up stuff in your local address book like you would in the GAL anyway