[Pharm BES Admin]

I am currently running a BES 3.6.2 on considerably old hardware. It is running MSDE 7.0 from the original setup and houses approx 160 BES users.
We received a FREE copy of BES 4.0 (new SRP) from Cingular and and want to implement 4.0 on brand new server hardware that we have already purchased. Once implemented and all users are moved we want to decommission the original BES. We are not currently using IT Policy with the 3.6 BES.

What would be my best path to perform this Upgrade/Migration to the new BES with the least downtime to my users? I would prefer not to require users to cradle their handhelds if at all possible.

I've read many threads here on very similar topics but haven't found one with quite the same scenario. Any suggestions or links to threads that can answer my question would be appreciated.

[bfrye]

I posted a howto on this a while ago. Search for it in my older posts and you should easily find it.

160 users is quite a lot for MSDE.

My howto ran through how to upgrade from a single BES installation hosting BES and MSDE on the same box to a dual-server setup running SQL and BES on separate boxes.

The MSDE and SQL databases work on both. So basically setup the new systems but don't turn them on. Shut the old BES down. Migrate the database to the new SQL server and make the appropriate changes for server and instance names. Bring the new database online. Bring the new BES server up and point it to the new database. Start BES services.

Took about 30 mins to do all of that once the servers were built and ready to go. Users hardly saw any downtime, and most didn't even notice. The differences in delivery time and updates is phenomenal and the migration process is fairly simple.

[bfrye]

Noticed you were running 3.6 though. I would probably upgrade 3.6 to 4.0 first. Make sure everything still works. Then go through the migration path I listed above.