Night at the Office

It had to happen sooner or later, the planning for the migration of hosted Exchange email and Blackberry services had been on going for a couple of weeks and the deadline had been set.

The MX record change was very smooth; we had been allocated 6.00pm GMT for the change to take place, and this was verified around 6.30pm on dnsstuff.com. Once the MX had been changed, I completed the email export from the hosting company, and imported these into the Exchange mailboxes on the new server using Outlook profiles on a workstation set up for this transition.

The interesting challenges came when configuring the Blackberries to talk to the new Blackberry Enterprise Server. In order to test this, I had requested 2 Blackberry 8310 handsets, along with Blackberry Enterprise Server activated SIMS from Vodafone. These arrived, and when powered on, showed that the handset had been connected to the Blackberry network. This was even verified by sending PIN to PIN messages between the handsets. So all looked good.

However, when connecting the new 8310 to the internal BES server using the Enterprise Activation option on the handset, the device would time out, and the Blackberry Manager would show no connection. Needless to say that this was somewhat disconcerting as I expected the handsets to function as they were brand new, and the SIMs were activated.

I searched the Blackberry Forums and came across an article about the 8300 not working with Vodafone, which was exactly what I was looking for. The problem outlined here reported the handsets as faulty, as when the SIM was placed in an older Blackberry it would work.

I hadn't tested this, and luckily had a couple of 8800s that also needed migrating. I started by activating them on the new BES with their existing SIMs, to confirm that the handset and SIM combination would work successfully with the new BES server. This was successful. The next step was to use the same SIM in a new 8310 and see if I was having the same problem as the forum article suggested. To my surprise, the SIM activated with the new Blackberry, and all applications were working. This clearly pointed to the SIMs not working, even though this had been checked twice with Vodafone.

The final piece was to put a new SIM into a known good 8800 Blackberry and try to connect - this failed as expected. It was 4.20am and at last I knew what the problem was.

Vodafone was contacted on Wednesday, and they instantly said 'the SIMs haven't been activated for Blackberry Enterprise Server - I'll do it now' How I wish they'd said it on Monday evening.

A special thanks to Stephen Grant for helping me bounce ideas around at 10.00pm on a Monday evening!