BES Express upgrade from BES 4.1

The good the bad and the ugly:


No upgrade path for the free version.

1. Good: It's FREE! A nice new version of BES, administer via a web browser. You can downgrade your data plan to use a simple data plan instead of a BES data plan from your carrier - but you lose over the air activation. The web site says the downloaded software includes one free tech support call (which you'll probably need :-).
2. Bad: Product confusion - BB Tech support thought there was no wipe handheld feature, but they researched it and found the feature... Under manage users, you need to click on the PIN number to show the feature.
3. Ugly: Takes an entire day to install and then you'll want to call BlackBerry to resolve the issues you have left. But reading and following the docs is the hardest part. Ugly: Users requested that I load some back email to the devices and there is a feature limited to 14 days and 200 messages. I didn't get that to work properly.

Having a VM with the 4.1 BES installed on it, I went through the following process to upgrade my installation:

1. Create a snapshot of the existing machine.
2. Check the requirements documents. Note that 9/10 of the requirements are the same between 4.1.6 and 5.0. Had some confusion over the CDO version 1.21 - the install document recommends installing a new file version that is not applicable to Exchange 2003. In this case the existing CDO file version 6.5.7654.12 is the correct one. The requirements doc leads me to believe that I need 1.5GB RAM for my base configuration - 8 users. But it continues to run fine with 700MB RAM, on Windows Server 2003 SP2.
3. Remove BES, Remove SQL Express.
4. Walk through the installation process.
5. BES Express is up and I can access it - Yay!
6. Troubleshoot remaining issues: Set an activation password and enter it on the device, the email is sent and I can see it in OWA. However the BES is not picking it up. Turns out that while I was uninstalling BES 4.1.6 - the email account information for my BESAdmin account was removed from Active Directory. Set up the account for Exchange access and made sure it was not hidden from the GAL. Then checked the ability to manage a user's mailbox using c:\program files\research in motion\blackberry enterprise server\iemstest.
7. Create a user, delete the user and can't re-create the user. Had to debug the download from corporate directory feature (the BESAdmin account issue). Also the user interface is confusing - if you delete a user and are trying to recreate it - the best thing to try is to go under create user, and search with no entries. You may get back a list of entries in the Global Address List. Check the user in that list. If you try to create a user who is already in the 'Corporate Directory' which has been imported from GAL - then you will get an error message.
8. Voila! All is running.

Exchange 2003 DST Updates Crib Sheet

1. Update OS patches on servers
   
   
   
   1. Taking care regarding security patches to Exchange and their effect on BES, or any other 3rd party email connector. http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?kbid=912918.
   
   
   
2. Update OS patches on clients. WSUS is your friend!
   
   
3. Use time zone edit tool (tzedit) on non-supported machines (Win NT)
   
   
   
   
   1. Tell everyone NOT to update their calendars once the patches are installed on the clients.
   
   
   
4. Patch the exchange server
   
   
5. Patch BES server with the exchange server patch (Exchange System Manager on BES server)
   
   
   
   1. There are no patches required for the Blackberry Enterprise Server itself.
      
   2. Get and install Blackberry Handheld patches.
   
   
   
6. Run the Exchange Calendar Update Tool (from a client machine or virutal machine)
   
   
   
   
   1. The tool has two parts, a GUI shell msextmzcfg.exe and the command line tool MsExTmz.exe. You need to get the LegacyDSN for the Exchange server to run the tool. It was found using adsi and checking the Exchange server object in Active Directory. Ours is: ServerDN=/o=COMPANY/ou=ADMINGROUP/cn=Configuration/cn=Servers/cn=SERVERNAME
      
      
   2. Run the GUI tool, which will step you through the process of creating batch files for the command line tool. 1st extract the list of mailboxes, then create batch files to update calendar entries in each. The GUI steps you all the way through this.
      
      
   3. You have a choice of updating recurring appointments. You will want to do this if your users have scheduled all day appointments that are now starting an hour into the previous day. We said "yes".
      
      
   4. Make sure to locate the executeable for Outlook. Outlook 11 is in a different directory than Outlook 12.
      
      
   5. Download and install the Office Outlook Time Zone Data Update Tool, and specify its location.
   
   
   
7. Given all of the above, the Exchange time zone update tool creates a batch file in a directory with the server's name. Run the batch file to update each mailbox using the client side Outlook update tool. This is a single threaded operation.
   
   
   
   1. Microsoft provides a downloadable virtual machine to facilitate multiple mailboxes to be updated at the same time. Scaling will require a serious evaluation of practical update speeds. (50 mailboxes with modest calendar usage took about 20 minutes in a single thread)
   
   
   
8. 
   
   
   
   1. Check the log files that the batch process produced.
      
   2. Remind everyone to check their calendar entries for the two target date ranges.
      
   3. Let everyone start updating their calendars.