Friday, December 11, 2009

Using BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) or Blackberry Professional 4.1 with Exchange 2010

BlackBerry Enterprise Server 4.1 and BlackBerry Professional 4.1 do not work with Exchange 2010 and while they promise to have an update for BES, small users like us with BlackBerry Professional are suck. But not to worry...there are ways to get around this.

I'm going to cover how I migrated our existing Exchange 2007 and BPS 4.1 environment over to Exchange 2010. As you're reading this, keep in mind there are several different variations on how this could be done. I'm going to first cover my exact steps, then address areas of variation.

We were running Exchange 2007 (all roles) on Windows 2008 Enterprise x64 server. BlackBerry was running on it's own Windows 2003 R2 x86 server.

1) I installed Exchange 2010 Enterprise with all roles on a single Windows 2008 R2 server.

2) I migrated all roles from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 using this roadmap.

3) I decommissioned the old Exchange 2007 server and shutdown our existing BlackBerry server.

4) I took a smaller server, Installed Windows 2003 R2 x64. I then installed Exchange 2007 SP2 on it with the MailBox role only.

5) I moved the BESAdmin mailbox to the new Exchange 2007 server. I then installed and configured BPS on the new Exchange 2007 server.

6) I setup each user in BlackBerry admin, then proceeded to wipe and activate each BlackBerry. We only have 6, so it wasn't that bad.

Now....let's go over some variations.

You'll notice that I installed a new Exchange Server. I did this because I didn't need all of that hardware and our old BlackBerry server was about ready to die. I wanted to consolidate anything needed for BlackBerry onto a single server. You could easily leave your existing Exchange 2007 server running with reduced roles and leave your BlackBerry server alone.

There are also several other ways of dealing with this, but ultimately you need:
- An Exchange 2007 server with your BESAdmin mailbox on it.
- A BES or BPS server running on Windows 2003.

Exchange 2007 only needs to have the mailbox role and it only needs the BESAdmin mailbox, your BlackBerry users can have their mailboxes located on the Exchange 2010 server.

This was a down and dirty posting. If I get a lot of feedback, I'll probably write something up that's a little bit better. I just wanted to get this out there for those of you trying to figure out if it could be done.






6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice to hear this option..Hope u got the time to write a sort of manual :)

thnx

Big$quish said...

aah. Nice to see a "workaround". Thank you for the insight.

Anonymous said...

Do you think it's key that you set up a NEW BES server? I realized there were issues and moved the BESAdmin account back off the Exchange 2010 box, but I still have issues opening the user mailboxes.

Anonymous said...

This did work for me, once I set up a NEW exchange 2007 server. It would not function using our existing server.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the post. Very encouraging. Which server did you put the public folder on?

Anonymous said...

Will this also work with Exchange 2003? Can i leave my Exchange 2003 running with just the BEadmin mailbox?