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Hints and Tips for Blackberries

BES - Blackberry Enterprise Server for Faculty and Staff

With BES, your BlackBerry becomes a wireless extension of your email mailbox that allows you to send, receive, forward and reply to messages at your convenience. It also allows you to manage and schedule appointments while you're on the go, access all your important contact information wherever you are, add, edit and delete tasks, and compose, edit and delete important notes and memos anywhere.

You will be sent an email with your Enterprise Activation Code. When you activate BES, the existing mail in your INBOX, your current appointments, tasks, and notes will be forwarded to your Blackberry. This will take up to 30 minutes. It will only move mail that is less than 7 days old.

  1. All your email will appear on your Blackberry in your Messages application. This includes email you have sent. The Messages application ALSO list SMS messages, missed called, and voice mails. Use the following keys to filter the message view:
    • ALT-S: SMS messages
    • ALT-P: Phone Messages
    • ALT-O: Sent Messages
    • ALT-I: Incoming Messages
  2. In order to synchronize READ and DELETED message between GroupWise and Blackberry, you must enable RECONCILE. Go into MESSAGES --> Hit the Scroll Wheel --> Select "Options" --> Select "Email Reconciliation" --> Turn Wireless Reconcile ON. Once it is ON, Go into MESSAGES --> Hit the Scroll Wheel --> Select "Reconcile Now"
  3. If you do not want to get notified every time a new email comes in, go to Profiles and edit the "Messages" option for your current profile.
  4. After you activate, you will get a second browser on your Blackberry. It has more capabilities and encryption. No more details are known.
  5. Use the COMPOSE application to SEND an email. To reply to or forward an email, use the option in MESSAGES.
  6. By default, no address books are synchronized. You will have to request that a specific address book be made available. Once an address book is available, changes made from the Blackberry are updated right away; changes made in GroupWise will take up to 4 hours to synchronize.
  7. To search the GroupWise System Address book, from your Blackberry Address Application, select "Lookup". It will return entries in the GroupWise system address book. In our case, those will include EMail and Phone for faculty and staff.
  8. When you SEND a message from the Blackberry, your GroupWise signature will NOT be attached. You can leave of a signature or create one for mail sent from the Blackberry. To configure your signature, Go into MESSAGES --> Hit the Scroll Wheel --> Select "Options" --> select Email Settings --> Turn "Auto Signature" and create the signature.
  9. Limitations:
    • You can only read mail in your inbox, and not in any other folders. However, you can MOVE an email message into another folder.
    • Setting "Out of Office" notification on the handheld is not supported for integration with the Novell GroupWise client.
    • When an email gets sent as HTML from the GroupWise Client, the email is received on the BlackBerry Wireless Handheld an attachment named "text.htm".
    • Recurring appointments created on the handheld do not show as recurring in the GroupWise client.
    • There is a size limit on messages and attachments. You will have to open the message TWICE to get the full message or attachment.
    • You can only VIEW attachments, not edit them.
    • MemoPad notes on your Blackberry become posted items in GroupWise.
    • If you ACCEPT an appointment in GroupWise and then DELETE that item on the Blackberry, the appointment gets DECLINED.
    • Under certian conditions, you may get an email with an empty body. In the GroupWise client, the email only displays in HTML view. What has happened is the the email gets sent with HTML in the mime header instead of as an attachment. Additionally, there is no text version inside the MIME header. The Blackberry does not know how to display this.
  10. Once the user's BB has been successfully configured and tested to receive mail from the BES:
    1. Log in to the BWC website at www.blackberry.com/go/vzw
    2. Click on Filters in the top ribbon
    3. Create a new filter
    4. Give it a name and select "Do not Forward Messages to the Handheld"
    5. Click Save and close.
    6. Log off of the BWC website.
    7. Once confirmed that the user has begun to send and receive email through the BES Call WDTS to delete the BWC account.