Company switching from POP to Exchange, now what?
 

I have never used exchange in my life before, I liked the POP the way it is both on my desktop and on my blackberry. I kept copies of my e-mails on server for 3 days and I got everything everywhere with enough time.

Now, the company just wrote to me, they are changing servers, and employees with blackberries will get Exchange and BES.

My question is this; how does Exchange work? Do I have to keep all my e-mails and address book on server? If we have, let's say 2GB space on server, what happens to older e-mails? I guess we still have to keep PST folders in our computer somehow. How about contacts? Do I have to keep my contacts on Exchange server? I always have notes, attachments, etc on my contact list notes section, so I would rather have my contacts local.

Lastly, how does this affect blackberry? Do I have to change my plan with AT&T from BIS to BES? I logged into my account, I don't see any option for BES.

I would appreciate if someone can help with a crash course on Exchange with Outlook or point me in the right direction so I can take advantage of the new server.

Is this your personal device or a company owned device?

Yes.

When you activate on BES for the first time, your device will be pre-populated with a maximum of 14 days (or 750 messages) worth of emails from your Exchange mailbox.
BlackBerry/BES doesn't do anything with PST files.

Yes, if you want them to sync wirelessly.

Then you need to turn off wireless sync of your address book, if your BES admin allows it.

Your device will be loaded with an IT policy which then dictates the functionality of the device and controls its features.
Just about all of your activity on the handset can be logged and/or audited by the BES admin.

Yes, you need a BES plan. Call AT&T and have them switch it for you. It's about $15 more per month for the BES plan.

If I don't change my plan to BES, can I continue receiving my e-mails the old fashioned way? I don't think we will have a strict IT admin who will monitor anything, we can just request them to allow everything without any provision and let it be free, the company will not have a single person taking care of all this, probably hosting will let everyone do it their own way.

When you say turn the wireless sync off, where do I do it? We have online outlook and I don't see anywhere to import my contacts from my old pst.

Besides blackberry, what is the difference on desktop? Since we will have Exchange now, what will happen to my existing PST's?

Maybe. That's up to your BES/Exchange admin. They'd need to configure Exchange to allow public POP, IMAP or OWA access.
From your other questions, it sounds like you may already have OWA access.

On your device, after you've activated on BES the option will become available to you.

Assuming you're referring to OUtlook Web Access... I don't believe this has any facility to import contacts.
When you activate on BES, your current device contacts will sync to Outlook.

No clue what this means.

Probably useless. You'd need to work that out with your Exchange admin.

Thanks for your answers. They activated our Exchange accounts and once outlook was set up to get our e-mails from server, we just opened/added .pst as local personal folders, and we were up and running. I kept my old e-mails there.

I called AT&T to enable BES.
Our admin said whatever was on the blackberry contacts would automatically be synchronized with Exchange.

Meanwhile I tried to synchronize my outlook address book with my blackberry so that the changes I made on my blackberry would be reflected on my outlook local address book, whenever I go to blackberry desktop, and try to select my local contacts, it crashes.

Update, everything is all set now and I am not syncing via wire anymore, but there is a problem with contacts. Some of my contacts has bunch of notes, and they get cut-off when they come to my blackberry, and in turn they get back to my outlook truncated.

There's likely a limit to the size of the Notes field on the contact record. I doubt there's any workaround for this.

Thanks penguin.
Can you think of some creative way to search for outlook contacts with notes field with over certain number of characters? Maybe I can export all my contacts to Excel, and then use excel to filter those.. and then I can go and edit them to reduce the amount of data in Notes.

How about attachments. I just did a trial with a brand new contact, it seems to work but with limitation.

The attachment <<profile.xls>> does not get synced over to BB, but it moves as Text, then if I make any changes to it, it comes back to Outlook as just text <profile.xls>> just BELOW the actual attachment, I can live with that, but all HTML formatting is gone, which is a big problem since I tend to copy/paste charts from e-mails into notes fields.

Whoops, another problem...
User Defined Fields do not get synced either... great! :shock: