[troybigby]

Hey all,

I have been watching the forum for some time now and wanted to get your thoughts on two querstions that I have. One regarding BES in the exchange environment, and the other regarding monitoring tools.

1st: What are your thoughts on BES in Exchange in regards to a distributed exchange environment. In my environment basically we have exchange servers in every office. NY,NJ, London,HK, SIngapore, etc. Some of the larger office have maybe 40 or more users whereas our office in south africa has 2! My issue is we have BES in NY and Europe to accomodate users in those office and some close, but what is the best way to work this scenario without buying BES servers for each office. BTW..majority of our users sit on NY server and we have one WAN link in NY. Is it better to worry about latency between BES and exchange?

2nd question: Which BES monitoring/reporting tools have you all used? Has anyone tried Mobile Monitor/Mobile Analyzer? or Boxtone and what are your thoughts on those?

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1. Ping times between your BES and Exchange should be below 30 ms. you might get away with ping times as high as 80-90 ms but it is not a good idea.

[twinkiefan]

1. It's not just about latency, though ping times are always a good predictor of the number of issues you may have between a BES and your mail server. We've found that we can tolerate ping times of up to 200ms with a large enough pipe between locations. When a WAN connection between two locations fills up, latency really starts to matter for us with regards to BES/Exchange, but for our locations with a high latency that have a large amount of bandwidth, it seems to work fine (amazingly enough). Grain of salt - we've only done this because we must (for now). I would recommend putting in a local BES for any location where you will see consistent ping times of above 50ms between BES and Exchange...your life will be easier and your users will make less noise.

2. I'm testing out MobileAnalyzer/Monitor right now. So far a nice tool...no bugs to speak of yet, but haven't dug real deep into the customizable features yet.

[troybigby]

Thankls for the information all. It is much appreciated!

[tgray]

We use Boxtone at our company and have been very pleased with its ability for reporting as well as the alerts it provides above and beyond what the BES is can provide.

I'm more of an end user support guy - not really a BES admin. But Boxtone allows me to view the status of all my BlackBerry users and their handheld information and activity. I don't have access to the BES, so it provides me have a real time reporting tool for end user support with the ability to export the data in spreadsheet form.

Regarding Boxtone's monitoring functions, we also have thresholds in place for users, user groups (like our execs), mail servers and BES servers to alert us when there are issues. With over 2000 BlackBerry users, this tool is invaluable for support and monitoring. I wish we had implemented something like this earlier.

Support for the tool is also great - they are very responsive when I have a question or need some assistance. I'm also looking forward to some of the new upgrades that are coming down the line that will increase our reporting options considerably.