[sigserv]

Let me start by saying that I know nothing about Blackberry devices or their connectivity - is it celular or Bluetooth or both?

Anyways, we are a small company. We have an Small Business Server 2003 box. We use exchange extensively.

The owner of the company has purchased a Blackberry 7250.

He wants this device to work seemlessly with Exchange. He will want two others to do the same.

Looking over this newsgroup, I gather that we'll need BES 4.0 (SMB?) for around $1600.00 and a separate computer for the BES Service.

My Questions are:

A. What is the most cost effective version of BES - part number?

B. What is involved on the wireless side of things? Our provider is Telus (In Canada) will out Blackberry devices actually connect wirelessly from anywhere and contact our Exchange Server?

C. What is involved in the installation of the product?

D. Can the separate computer used to install BES on, also be used as a regular workstation?

Thanks...

Richard

[DoomBringer]

BlackBerrys are cellphone devices. Only a select few models have Bluetooth.
A. You'll want the small business version. This has a limit of 20 users, IIRC.
B. Yes. Your BBs will be able to access the cell phone network and interact with your BES server.
C. You'll need to add 3 users to your AD. The installation procedure took me a full day. I read the manuals twice before doing it. It is rather intensive, but the manuals are good enough.
D. It can, but I wouldn't do it. Since all you have is a 3 user BES, you can safely run the BES on a very low end machine. I would reccomend Win2k Server (or higher) on at least at box with a gig of RAM. BES can be processor intensive, but only at higher user loads. BES lives on the machine with its bestest buddy, the database (You'll want MSDE, instead of SQL Server), so you'll need a decent sized HD (20 gigs, and don't worry about SCSI, IDE will do fine). Using it as a regular workstation wouldn't be too smart. The guy using it would cause it to crash, slow down, etc... it could be done, but I'd hate to be the one responsible for it breaks because of something dumb on the part of the user. BES, like other enterprise servers, is best as a "Set and forget" install.

[DoomBringer]

BTW, using NewEgg, we made our BES for around $1000, the shuttle small form factor thing with two gigs DDR, HT P4, and a decent 7200RPM IDE drive. In fact, its more server than we need.

[sigserv]

Thanks for the info!

There is one item left in my mind.

Can I use an old Windows NT 4.0 box to install BES on? It's a P2-400 - is this good enough for 2 or three users?

[FlemmingRiis]

Originally Posted by sigserv

Thanks for the info!

There is one item left in my mind.

Can I use an old Windows NT 4.0 box to install BES on? It's a P2-400 - is this good enough for 2 or three users?

You want windows2000 or 2003 as for machine if it can boot the os it really dont matter , i would find a box with 512mb ram and a p3 something for sanity sake.

any 300 buck pc will do the trick just make sure to add backup if you dont have raid , well do no matter what.

[DoomBringer]

Originally Posted by FlemmingRiis

You want windows2000 or 2003 as for machine if it can boot the os it really dont matter , i would find a box with 512mb ram and a p3 something for sanity sake.

any 300 buck pc will do the trick just make sure to add backup if you dont have raid , well do no matter what.

BES can run on NT4, but NT4 is positively ancient. I'm not looking at the installation manual, but NT4 won't work with an Exchange 2003 mail environment, IIRC.

[corey@12mile]

BES won't run on NT4 anymore. 2000 or better now.

cd.