BlackBerry® Professional Software and BlackBerry® Enterprise Server Express

[terryr]

Hi all, first time poster in the Blackberry forums and also new Blackberry Professional Software user.  I've been put in charge of setting up a BPS server inside our office which I have completed by following the installtion video.  I am now at the point where I need to set the phone up to connect to the server.  When I add the email and password and try to activate I get an authentication error.  I believe this to be because our registered domain name does not point to our internal servers but to our hosted web services.  Our email also passes through an external third party source for spam and virus filtering before it gets forwarded to us so our mx records also do not point to our local domain.  Is there anything I can do to solve this problem?  Am I even close to this being the real issue at hand or am I way off?  Hopefully there is a solution.

Thanks for any responses.

[bbhorrigan]

So the BES and the mail server are not in the same domain?

[terryr]

Our exchange server is local as is the BPS server.  What isnt local is our spam filtering.  Here is a basic flowchart of what happens with our incoming mail.

Email sent to us -> mail comes into 3rd party offsite spam filter -> mail comes into our exchange server.

The same happens with outbound mail because of some strange outbound spam filtering by our isp. (ie: we use the 3rd party offsite service as our smtp relay).

BPS is local as is our exchange server however they are on seperate machines.

Terry

[wusmani · Accepted solution]

There are other ways of activation as well:

- Through the Desktop Manager: Install the desktop manager on the user's computer (selecting redirect using BES in all options). When you start the DM, it will prompt you for a profile, select the user's MAPI profile. Once you see "Online" on the bottom, that means the DMS is connected to your BlackBerry server. Connect the device, and the activation should start automatically.

- Connect the device directly to the server: Connect the device to the server through a USB cable, and make sure the device has been detected. Right click on the user, and select "assign device". Sit back, and wait for the activation to finish.

There are ways of fixing the over-the-air (OTA) activation; but they will be a big hassle for you. If you still want to use OTA activation, then ask your service provider to allow emails with .DAT attachments, and allow emails from the domain *.blackberry.net. Usually the emails come from something like: network@etp200x.etp.na.blackberry.net. This is the main activation email, which should NOT be tampered with at all (some filters change the subject line).

My two cents..

[terryr]

Once I activate, will this setup cause any issues?  I am still a little bit foggy on how the blackberry manages to connect and sync to the PC once "out in the wild".  I'm going to search for a flow chart to make sure I have a good grasp on it before asking any more questions on the matter.

[wusmani]

No you shouldn't have any issues after activation - you can use any of the three methods.

As per architecture diagram, have a look at this:  

http://na.blackberry.com/eng/ataglance/security/bes_diag_small.jpg