LogBlog

So we took the dive, and Logic is now running the brand new version, Exchange Server 2010.

All of our email is working great on the new server after ironing out all the kinks, the toughest one for me was getting Blackberry Professional Server (BPS) to integrate.

OWA 2010

We started out on Exchange 2007 and Blackberry Professional 4.1 was running just fine from a separate windows 2003 32bit server.

When I moved my mailbox and the BESAdmin mailbox to the 2010 machine, Blackberry stopped syncing and sending/receiving email. (big surprise)

I spent a bunch of time on the internet researching this and learned that RIM does not support the 4.1 version of BPS/BES with Exchange 2010. The new version of BES is 5.0, but BPS (which is free) will not have any future releases, which is a drag since I don’t want to spend some $2k or whatever on BES 5.

Nobody I found had posted any success stories about this yet so I figured I would.

So… do you want to run Exchange 2010 with BPS 4.1?

First download and install BPS 4.1 from the Blackberry site. Use a 32bit 2003 server.

http://na.blackberry.com/eng/support/downloads/#tab_tab_professional

Follow the guides on the blackberry site to install BPS. You’ll need to set some permissions for the BESAdmin account on your exchange server which includes running these two commands from the Exchange Management Shell (EMS):

add-exchangeadministrator “BESAdmin” –role ViewOnlyAdmin

add-adpermission –user “BESAdmin” –accessrights ExtendedRight –extendedrights Send-As, Receive-As, ms-Exch-Store-Admin

Now on the BES, download and install ExchangeMapiCdo.EXE from the Microsoft site. (google it) I got it working with version 6.5.8153.0.

Lastly, I had to disable RPC Encryption on the Exchange 2010 server, which is on by default. Run this from EMS and replace servername with your server name:

Set-RpcClientAccess –Server servername –EncryptionRequired $False

Disable RPC Encryption

Troubleshooting:

Log in to the BES and open “Edit Mapi Profile” from the blackberry folder in the start menu.

Make sure the check name button resolves the BESAdmin mailbox with no errors. That will show that BPS is seeing the right stuff in active directory.

Connect to the BESAdmin mailbox using Outlook. Add an Blackberry user’s mailbox and try sending email as that user.

That will verify the BESAdmin has Send As permission to the mailbox.

If that stuff all works and your Blackberry still doesn’t talk, check the BPS log files. By default they are kept here:

C:\Program Files\Research In Motion\BlackBerry Enterprise Server\Logs

Good luck! And comment if you run into questions or find any other cool info.

-John Matzek, CEO - Logic IT Consulting