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:-
We come across this problem from time to time:-
Customer wrote:
I never understand this as you set it to auto delete.
Customer
--- Sent via BlackBerry
-----Original Message-----
From: Quota Manager <Administrator@blackberry.com>
Date: Tue, x Dec 200x xx:xx:xx To:customer
Subject: Mailbox full
One or more messages could not be delivered
to your mailbox because they would have put
your mailbox disk usage over its quota.
The system will keep trying to deliver these messages.
To receive them, you must delete some old messages
from your mailbox.
This customer never seemed to get the grip of this, so I resorted to my ever favorite tactic, everyday analogy. Here it is.
