BlackBerry Forums Support Community

drew138 · 12-21-2006, 08:12 PM

I have an address book with 27,00 contacts in outlook synced with an Exchange Sever running the Blackberry Enterprise Server. I loaded all the contacts into outlook and the BB synched down a lot of them into the address book. Unfortunately, this seems to really taxing the performance of the BB. It runs very slowly now and has the hour glass is lighting up all the time.

Is there a way that I can store them directly on the BB Enterprise Server and gain access to them using the lookup feature (i.e., the contacts are not on my device, but stored on the server?

Any help would be appreciated?

Thanks

Drew

Stinsonddog · 12-21-2006, 08:24 PM

Yes you can do that with BES. Post in the BES section and they might be able to help you.

tsac · 12-21-2006, 09:15 PM

I have a lookup function in my address book that links with the corporate listing of 240k people. Saves a lot of memory and works really quick OTA.

d_fisher · 12-21-2006, 09:35 PM

Yes you can do a lookup, but its the same address book for all BES users. If this is a corporate address book then thats not a problem. If this is your personal address book your out of luck.

takeshi · 12-22-2006, 09:50 AM

Would any of your 27,000 contacts be in the GAL as well? Can you drop a significant number of contacts if that's the case?

drew138 · 12-22-2006, 04:50 PM

I wouldn't want this in the GAL, but having it on the BES wouldn't be a problem since there are only 2 BB users on the system. I'll x-post this in the BES section.

As a side note, the BB finally loaded / synched all 27k records onto the handheld from my outlook address book, but now the BB has completely lost its ability to "find" any records in the address book. It used to dynamically filter out results based on my text inputs.... but now the only way I can get to a contact is if I scroll... not too helpful with this many contacts??

Any thoughts?

nbavosa · 12-22-2006, 05:08 PM

I am not pointing fingers or accusing... Poster I am not saying you are...

If someone asked me what I thought about this I would say it sounds like a person is planning to sell off emails to spammers etc.

Does anyone else out there in the berry world have that many contacts?

Mods... Please remove if I am out of line.

phidauex · 12-22-2006, 05:39 PM

nbavosa, I appreciate your concern for everyone, but spamming from a blackberry wouldn't be very effective (why not just spam from a computer, like everyone else?).

The people with such huge contact lists are probably working for very large companies or institutions. For instance, someone working in HR for, say, IBM, may need access to quick contact information for their entire employee base, which is nearly 400,000 individuals. Of course, they wouldn't want this stored ON the blackberry, but they would need to have the ability to quickly look it up, which is something that the BES server can provide.

So don't worry, this isn't a tool that would be useful to spammers, just people who work in giant institutions who need to contact a lot of people around the institution.

peace,
sam

drew138 · 12-22-2006, 05:45 PM

Surely, I can't be the only person with this many contacts that need to searched???? These contacts are from our CRM system and there is no easy way to synch these into the BB for access when not in front of a PC. We don't want our entire CRM contact database loaded into our GAL; but want access to this database from the BB.

Still looking for suggestions or help; or clarification as to why the BB isn't indexing the contacts in the address book.

Drew

PS: Thanks Sam.

nbavosa · 12-22-2006, 05:51 PM

I see what you are saying but you dont see what I am saying..

I am assuming "Contacts" does not only include addresses that would go to a blackberry, espically in a company customer contact list. Which in most cases is correct IMO.

For instance... I work for a MSO that has well over 1 million customers, if I gathered a list of those email addresses under customer contact information it would probably be there email address like AOL, Google, Yahoo or ISP

In my case I have my several email accounts forwarded to my cingular address and that is how it comes to my berry.

So a spammer or "Advertiser" would find these addresses useful.

Did you ever see a movie where a employe loads data onto a storage device to steal it.. that what comes to my mind.

POSTER...No offence to you.

markhutchison · 12-22-2006, 07:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by drew138

...These contacts are from our CRM system ...

PeopleSoft has a CRM solution for BlackBerry: https://www.blackberry.com/EmailSign...nup=peoplesoft

markhutchison · 12-22-2006, 07:41 PM

More BlackBerry CRM solutions:

https://www.blackberry.com/ThirdPart...=all&x=25&y=11

drew138 · 12-22-2006, 08:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by nbavosa

I see what you are saying but you dont see what I am saying..

I am assuming "Contacts" does not only include addresses that would go to a blackberry, espically in a company customer contact list. Which in most cases is correct IMO.

For instance... I work for a MSO that has well over 1 million customers, if I gathered a list of those email addresses under customer contact information it would probably be there email address like AOL, Google, Yahoo or ISP

In my case I have my several email accounts forwarded to my cingular address and that is how it comes to my berry.

So a spammer or "Advertiser" would find these addresses useful.

Did you ever see a movie where a employe loads data onto a storage device to steal it.. that what comes to my mind.

POSTER...No offence to you.

No offense taken; it's just seems/ seemed an odd response to a seemingly legit question. I can think of a million ways to steal information from a company; and the use of a blackberry is probably among the least practical solutions. Much easier to load it onto an ipod, send it to a gmail, convert it to a hex file and print it.....

Anyway, the thread has now taken a crazy turn and has far diverged from its original intent,

Others, thanks for the CRM links, but I don't think we are going to launch a new CRM platform for this issue.

Drew

PS: Happy Holidays to all!

markhutchison · 12-22-2006, 09:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by drew138

...I don't think we are going to launch a new CRM platform for this issue...

You should not have to change your existing CRM infrastructure. There are many companys that can build an application that will link to your CRM databases and push the data out to your BlackBerry.

drew138 · 12-22-2006, 09:37 PM

Cross-posted on the BES Admin forum and the mods didn't like it?

Anyway, I had added new information so I'll re-post my post form the other thread, which was closed..:(

------------------
I have an Outlook client, an Exchange Server, and BES. We have 2 users on 8700's and no other users. BES synch's our exchange data on the BB's and also sync's local data (address book, tasks, etc.) to the BB.

I'm trying to get an extract of contact data from our CRM pushed down to the 2 8700's we are running. I attempted to load these into my personal address book; and they did actually synch to my handheld device after about 10 hours! Now the search and lookup fearture is totally useless and you really cannot query the Blackberry address book. It seems to have basically lost its abilty to index the data

So now I'm trying to figure out how I can make this information accessible to the BB handheld? I don't want to load these into the GAL since I don't want to have these contacts synch with our company's outlook address book.

Does anyone have a suggestion on how I can do this, or if there is a way to force the local Address Book on the handheld to start indexing the local records????

Thanks for any help or suggestions.

Drew
------------------------

tsac · 12-22-2006, 09:50 PM

I have a lookup to corporate database with 240k people and keep my contacts stored on the BB. Just dont save any you dont need to keep there.

Xaneth · 04-05-2007, 05:19 PM

I know this is probably too late to post, but you can always develop an internal web page that connects to your customers in the CRM, and connect securely over MDS with your BB. I'm looking into such a solution for our company as well.

tobyw · 04-06-2007, 05:52 AM

This is something I might be interested in for a problem I'm looking at currently. The CRM solution exports to Outlook contacts, and it would be great if BB users could access contacts held in a public folder. However, while it seems that sync with a public folder is possible, this requires you to change the setup in DM from which point sync becomes wired only, and presumably you loose the opportunity to sync with personal contacts. Anyone any ideas here apart from "merging" the public folder with personal contacts?

RLLD · 04-06-2007, 08:45 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tobyw

This is something I might be interested in for a problem I'm looking at currently. The CRM solution exports to Outlook contacts, and it would be great if BB users could access contacts held in a public folder. However, while it seems that sync with a public folder is possible, this requires you to change the setup in DM from which point sync becomes wired only, and presumably you loose the opportunity to sync with personal contacts. Anyone any ideas here apart from "merging" the public folder with personal contacts?

There is a way to create lists on the server itself. In this manner you can effectively create distribution lists and sync them to the device as a single contact entry.

rkkeller · 04-07-2007, 06:52 AM

I dont know if this will work with your setup but just get a Remote Desktop program and use your computers MS Outlook when you need it ? Save only your main most needed contacts to the BB and use the RD software to connect direct to your desktop to do searches or look up contacts.

I do this and also when I need to do more with Word/Excel/PDF than the BB supports. Why buy all kinds of additional expensive BB programs when you already have everything you need on your PC. If I need to edit a MS Word/Excel document, I use the RD to make the changes on the PC then email it also from the PC. You can also send to many contacts faster this way and copy to your BB if you need it direct.

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27,000 Contacts; How to get them on my BB efficently?