We recently finished upgrading an NT 4.0 domain and Exchange 5.5 mail server to Windows 2003 and Exchange 2003. After turning off AD and decommisioning the 5.5 server, we attempted an upgrade of our Blackberry Enterprise Server from 2.1 to 4.0. Simple, Right?

Blackberry apparently upgraded the licensing structure, and our license keys didn’t work with 4.0. So, we need to call Research in Motion, the makers of Blackberry. They asked for copies of invoices showing proof of purchase. This was back in 2001, several iterations of IT departments ago, at least 3 accounting departments ago, and stored offsite. I have no idea when they were purchased, who they were purchased from, and didn’t want to spend a day offsite combing through every invoice.

We went back and forth between technical support, Blackberry customer service, Blackberry support, and back to CDW to try and find if there was any way to get the information from the running, operational server. If I could send them a screen shot showing an operational 20-license server, would that suffice?

6 hours of my guy waiting on hold, 2 hours of me escalating, and the final verdict is: BES 2.1 doesnt store the license information anywhere. They relented and sent us a 20-seat license key.

Now we can add over-the-air calendar sync and fix a long-standing issue with inbox sync not working.

The week before, we turned on meeting rooms as resources and documented a new process for meeting room reservations. People hated the old means of using public folders, but people are resistant to change. Hopefully they’re used to it now.

Next week’s projects:

cleaning up public folders that were configured with no security at the root. People created folders willy-nilly and forgot about them. Now there’s a mess at the root level and no way to delegate responsibility. I’m going to lock down the root folder, create a shared folder and a common department structure, then move everything else into a junk folder to be sorted out. Maybe by getting rid of the crap in the public folders I can rid the company of wall calendars. Writing your department schedule on a poster-sized wall calendar just never seemed to make sense when you have a perfectly functional shared online calendar.