Most individuals that use their Blackberry in a small businesses environment would not buy Blackberry Enterprise Server for Exchange as it is simply too expensive and quite pointless for one or two users. Here is one method to bypass this and use the (UK) mobile phone providers Blackberry infrastructure and run it in conjunction with your Exchange system.
Since this article was written, IMAP and Outlook Web Access (OWA) have been made available via the Blackberry web gateway for a lot of providers. However mileage with these services vary and so there are sometimes reasons for reproducing the setup below. I'll also mention here that runPCrun can provide managed Microsoft Exchange hosting with full over the air Blackberry synchronisation from £12 p/mailbox with, call us if you are interested in this.
It's main advantages over just setting up standard POP3 collection are immediate (push) delivery of messages (rather that waiting for the Blackberry service to poll the POP3 provider) and also items sent via your Blackberry are kept in your Sent Items in Outlook/Exchange. This is attained with a little bit of tweaking and performs very well, although (obviously) the calendar,notes and tasks are not synchronised over the Internet as with the full blown server. In a small company this is not an issue and the synchronisation can occur easily using the cradle.
What this method does in a nutshell is when an email is received, it is forwarded immediately to the blackberry address. When a new mail or reply is sent from the Blackberry, it is sent masquerading as the Exchange email, and a copy is BCC'ed to the Exchange email address. This email is the sorted into the Sent Items folder using a server side rule.
The steps to attain this are thus:-
Ask your provider for the URL of the web interface. Common ones include:-
(You can also try to do a Google search for "blackberry internet service" nameofprovider )
Sign up the Blackberry via the web interface using the PIN and IMEI that you have on your Blackberry. In the web interface set up the following:-
Set a rule in Outlook (because you are using Exchange this will be a constantly working Server side rule) to move any emails received from yourself to be moved into the Sent Items folder. (this of course works on the assumption that you don't send emails to yourself normally, and if you do you will have to set a different rule up, perhaps identifying via Email Headers). I've seen a couple of providers weirdly encode the From: address so a rule may not work. You will see for instance
From: Joe Bloggs <3kfjUTF-8jdls@runpcrun.com>
If you are having problems with the rules not matching, just check the email headers and set a rule to match the encoded address as well.
Sending and receiving email is transparent to the end-user through the Blackberry and are sent and received as the primary email address in Exchange. Emails sent from the Blackberry are stored in the users Sent Items folder in Exchange and all without having to set up a Blackberry Enterprise Exchange Server and without having to start up and open POP3 on your Exchange server.
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This looks very helpful. Can I ask whether this procedure has any advantage over setting up my work email address under the T-mobile Blackberry Internet Service, which as I understand it will then deliver any emails sent to my work address to my Blackberry?
That was dealt with in the second paragraph. Two advantages are immediate delivery (rather than 1-2 minutes) and the emails that you send are saved in your work email address.
If you have a small business and need to sync calendar, notes, addresses book and emails using blackberry with a Microsoft exchange service, consider hosted blackberry enterprise and Microsoft Exchange service. It's cheap ($20 per month or less for both services). Look for it in Google. This will streamline your business!
Yes, absolutely this is indeed a good solution, and one we recommend to our clients where appropriate.
However there are various reasons that this might not be appropriate. Just to give one example, there is an existing Exchange infrastructure with say 10 users. Only one user needs Blackberry functionality and synchronising contacts and calendar isn't important to them (You'd be amazed how many people do not use the calendar - I for one couldn't live without it). In this example moving everyone over to a hosted Exchange solution just for one Blackberry is obviously not an option. Also as mentioned, the Desktop Application can synchronise whenever the Blackberry is docked on their main machine.
There are many others, we find that IT in small businesses are like snowflakes. They look the same from a distance but if you examine them closely they all look quite different! We try not to force solutions or equipment on people without very good reasons.
Is it not the case that the emails will appear on the Blackberry as FWD and from the user themself as a result of the forwarding rule on the server ? So the from column is all the same.
Sandy
No, the emails appear to be from the original sender. The server side rule does not change who it is "from".
Also, in the users "Sent Items" because it's an Auto BCC, it appears from the user and to the proper recipient.
The only byproduct is that the emails appear "unread" (in the "Sent Items"), which our users seem to like - it help differentiate at a glance the emails sent from Outlook and the ones sent from the Blackberry - useful when they come to review.
Dan
I appreciate the swift reply. I am still not getting the FW to disappear and the sender is still appearing as the user, on the Blackberry.
If I concentrate on the incoming only. Exchange account has one rule (server side applied via OWA) to forward copies of all incoming to Contact ZZ_Blackberry DO NOT DELETE (address is t-mobile webmail address). Email is forwarded but does not appear to be from original sender.
I have done nothing about the suggested filter on the t-mobile webmail to "not send" on receiving emails form the email address you will be masquerading as, because that is the email address on the Exchange server that is forwarding the emails. If that filter was set then surely nothing forwarded by Exchange would be sent to the Blackberry ?
Got me puzzled. Hope you can explain further because I really want this to work.
regards
Sandy
Everything under "Exchange Setup" is done on the server in "Active Directory Users and Computers", not in Outlook or OWA, maybe I was not clear about that and I will amend the article accordingly.
* Set up a Contact for the BLACKBERRY address (you'll see that in the "Email accounts" section of the web interface e.g.on o2 it will be will be something like xxxxyyyyy@o2email.co.uk) in Active Directory Users and Computers on the Exchange Server
* Set up a forward in Exchange on his normal account to the new "Contact" mail account.
* Hide the new Exchange contact using the AD/Exchange manager afterwards if you wish, some people can get confused by it when it is in the Global Address List.
The emails then appear to be from the original sender, and a rule at your Blackberry provider to not sent emails when from the users email address will not cause a problem.
Dan,
Will incoming mail still be in the users inbox on the Exchange server with this set-up?
Doug Jones
Quite simply, yes.
Dan,
I really like you suggestion and would prefer it over the OWA approach if there was some way to sync deletes, i.e. when email is deleted from either device/pc all instances of the email are deleted. Any thoughts on this?
Thanks,
-Justin
I've noticed that at least one UK provider has started offering Exchange access via OWA. I've not investigated it yet, so I don't know how effective it is.
To sync deletes it's up to your provider, you may be able to set up POP access with delete, I have a vague recollection of that being possible with a UK provider, but they all seem to offer slightly different services/interfaces from what I can see.
I have been trying the OWA approach but it is slower than the approach that you suggested. So, I guess there is a trade off...get email fast or have delete sync. Wish they wouldn't make this so hard; might have to switch to Windows Mobile device.
Thanks for the response,
-Justin
Hi Dan,
I have been trying to set up a Blackberry 8310 using this article. I use a Microsoft Exchange account with a hosted provider. You mention the set up for the forwad via the Active Directory - can I access this - or because I have a hosted package and no server on site - am I stuck and have to use a hosted BE solution.
Many thanks
Stephen
If you can't access this because you have a hosted solution (maybe this functionality is in your hosted providers control panel?), you can always set it up via POP3 access. Ask your provider what the POP3 settings (it'll be their a server address, coupled with a username and password) are and use those in your Blackberry web interface for setting up email collection (you might have to use "advanced" POP3 setup and provide the servername yourself, a lot of Blackberry providers use some sort of detection to try to ascertain your settings)
Anyway, all it'll mean is you have a slight delay when receiving emails (around 5 minutes for a lot of providers for polling POP3), not a big problem and the rest of the article you should be able to follow as is here.
This has been very useful and I've successfully configured Exchange and the Blackberry service. However, is there anyway that I can configure it so that when I'm in the office and I'm plugged into the network (and exchange) and picking up my email normally that my Blackeberry does'nt pick up the email. i.e. if I'm in the office only Outlook will pick up my email, when I'm off the network my Blackberry will kick in???
Any help would be great.
Thanks.
I think the short answer is "No".
You can find some way of stopping the forward, even access the server and disable it, then re-enable it when you leave.
But there's no simple mechanism for the Blackberry to know where you are (or connected to Outlook) and then execute some form of scripted action as appropriate.
Although this is a decent solution, why not save yourself a lot of hassle and add extra functionality by ditching your blackberry and buying a Windows Mobile device (XDA etc).
Then you can use active sync to sync directly with your exchange server, including contacts and calendar!
That's a funny comment! That's not the focus of this article and Blackberry's are very popular devices these days for one reason or another.
Personally I prefer Windows Mobile Device's too and I've never owned a Blackberry. However I can't just say to a customer "Ditch that Blackberry you're using" especially if they are used to it. We have to do the best for our customers with the materials provided.
Or you can configure the blackberry internet service to connect to your Outlook Web Access account and then you don't need to do anything in Active Directory. You also dont ever have to worry about your e-mail account at the ISP getting full.
Starsky
Yes, since I wrote the article this option has appeared on many UK mobile operators that support Blackberry :)
I'm sorry to reply to such an old story; but I'm curious.
Isn't Exchange 2003 capable of serving email through IMAP? Wouldn't setting up email through IMAP handle all of this more or less automatically (including push email and handling sent messages)?
I'm just starting to look into BlackBerrys for our small organization; and avoiding $500 for BlackBerry Professional would be nice.
Thanks
No need to apologise!
Yes, since the story was written, UK mobile operators have added IMAP and Outlook Web Access collection to their systems (and made the POP simpler with no "mailbox" and "auto aging")
So yes they should work, but I can't confirm this as recently we've stopped using the mobile operators systems with POP/IMAP/OWA and are using Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) services due to the Contacts/Calendar/Tasks synchronisation over the air.
However, the one operator we have tried using IMAP/OWA with Exchange 2003 and 2007 recently is Vodafone, and they've been causing problems with POP, IMAP and OWA collection from Exchange as far as we've seen. The problem seems to be that multiple copies of emails are delivered when people access their mailbox. So these people have had to default to the mode of operation set out above, where Vodafone don't interact at all with the mailbox.
Great posts all been very helpful ! this solution will work a treat for us and i think everything else is looking to be a bit picky !!
Hopefully this is not to off topic. Does having the user use OWA stop the email forwarding? In other words would the company email still go to and be stored on a blackberry server? We don't want our email on a third parties server.
hello, cant seem to find the user guide that tells me where to add the settings above and i cant seem to find the settings bit on my blackbery?
help plz?
FYI: Blackberry will give you BES for free with one license included if someone in your organization owns a blackberry device. Each additional license is around $100.
I have followed these steps and everything is working perfectly for e-mail (better than pop3 access!) but when the users tries to sync the calendar from the desktop software the calendar entries in outlook get deleted. When we look at the calendar settings in the blackberry it now shows the 02 e-mail address when it should be showing the exchange user. The desktop sync software shows the correct mappings for the outlook profile. How do we get the calendar sync working again?
Hi Dan,
What no one ever mentions is the fact that this procedure is useless for emails that originated outside the company network. The rules that prevent relaying mean that any email that did not come from joe.soap@yourdomain.com will not be forwarded.
Ed Form
Hi Ed,
I'm afraid the reason no-one mentions it is because it actually isn't true.
I'm not sure what is different about your setup, but if this was the case the customers that I deployed this too would have shot me by now :)
There is no "relaying" going on per se, your Exchange server is accepting the emails as normal and then it is forwarding it (essentially as a new email) to another email address held by your Blackberry provider.
The Blackberry receives it at this address but when it sends out it rewrites the FROM address as the original address.
Hi,
I have a BLACK BERRY BOLD device and i have the black berry internet service connection as well, however i am not able to setup the email account. I do not find any option to setup my mail box. There are only options to setup the email address.
Can you guide me pls
I've not seen this Blackberry, so I would talk to your service provider - I'm sure they'd be happy to help.