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Blackberry, BES and Entourage 2004 = problem deleting mail

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tmckeown

IS-IT--Management
Nov 15, 2002
448
US
Hi guys,

We have Blackberry Enterprise Server 4.0 (BES) for Exchange. It works fine for all PC users. Unfortunately, our company is 50% Mac OSX users. So, we use Entourage 2004 for email. It connects to the Exchange server through WebDav, similar to Outlook Web Access. It can sync mail, contacts and calendar to the exchange server. Over-all it works just fine. But, it does something that BES does not like, apparently. I spoke with RIM (Blackberry) support for a few hours to track down what is happening. If a user deletes an email from inside Entourage, the email will not be deleted off the BlackBerry. However, it does show up as deleted in both Outlook Web Access and Outlook. So, Exchange does know that the email has been deleted. BES does not see it as deleted though. From my work with RIM support, it appears that Entourage deletes the Ref ID of the email when it deletes the email. BES tracks email only by the Ref ID (according to RIM support).



This causes our Mac users to have to delete email twice; once in Entourage and once on the Blackberry. Has anyone else run into this? If so, did you find a solution? Right now, RIM and Microsoft are saying it's the others fault.

Tom
 
We have the same issue with deleting mail in entourage. We do not have BES mobile data services enabled, do you? I read somewhere it could be linked to that service not being up and running.

We are running 4.0 BES and 4.0 blackberry clients and when you send mail from a windows outlook client or a WOA, sent items show up in the blackberry. But from entourage sent items are not synchronized.

Seems like a BES / RIM issue. Please let me know when you make any progress.
 
No progress here. I've given up on trying to make it work any better than it does. I've spoken at length with both Microsoft and RIM support. Both blame the other for problems encountered. My take on it? RIM is not tracking mail the way Microsoft intends, so RIM does have a problem. On the other hand, Entourage is a bad joke played on Macs. Entourage also does not handle email correctly from a sync point of view. Entourage deletes inportant information from the header of an email when it is moved to the deleted items folder. Once that info is gone, no correct sync is going to happen. It almost seems like someone else (other than Microsoft) designed Entourage. It simply does not work well enough. For the casual user, it could be fine, but on a corporate level, I get nothing but complaints.

I don't know why Microsoft could not have come out with Outlook for Mac OSX. That would have made sense.
 
Hey, so, first seriously,

can we all keep in touch. Finding groups of people with substantial Windows and Macintosh users running Exchange and BES have been EXCEEEDINGLY difficult to find. I think we are rare admins.

Next, on to your problem:
Yes, users will have to delete their mail on the BB twice.
I have taught the users to use the Delete Prior mail. If they need something to stay on the blackberry, file it...

On to the soapbox:
I am moving all of my users back to Outlook 2001 for Macintosh. I know it runs in Classic and it isn't as pretty, but it works flawlessly with Exchange. Added benefits are improved Exchange and Network performance. Complete Outlook/Exchange groupware features, tasks, notes, etc. The added benefit of this is when we move to BES4.0 they will have FULL feature availability.
We have had a laundry list of issues with Entourage and Exchange. We are a very calendar dependent company, with dozens of revisions of meetings and Entourage is simply not keeping up...

Please, email me with any experiences you may have had in this environment that you feel is unique to our special mix of systems and users...

Robert Liebsch
Stone Yamashita Partners
 
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