Best way to move a BB off one BES and onto another?

[alee0729]

Scenario:

Let's say a user has a personal BB with all his contacts registered to company A.

He leaves that company, the company removes his BES account and so nothing is being updated.

He then comes to the BES admin at company B to get his device added to the BES server at company B. He doesn't want to lose his contacts, and doesn't want to hard reset his device.



Question: What's the cleanest way to handle this?

It would seem that if I remove the service books for company A, then register the device with BES at company B, that should be it. However, I don't know if his contacts will sync to the company B Exchange Server at that point, or whether the Exchange server takes precedence over the contacts and promptly wipes the device of all contacts.

[Mark_Venture]

I can't give you a complete answer, but I can give you a few things to think about as one of my team mates recently took part in an similar exercise.

A VIP working at an operating company with its own BES & Exchange Org (will call that OC1) transferred back into the main company with its own BES and Exchange Org (will call that MC1)..

The Challenge, how to bring the contacts along...

My mate just tried activating the device against MC1's BES. Well, the already present contacts on the device didn't sync back to MC1's exchange environement. This is likely because on newer hand held OS's, there are separate contact lists and calendars based on mail account.

The IT Policy from MC1's BES failed to be accepted by the hand held. This was expected since the IT Policy from the old BES was still in place on the device. You need to security wipe a device to get it ready to accept a new IT policy, or use javaloader (or other tools) to remove the IT Policy, which will also erase the hand held's data.

In our case, there is a move process for the user's windows and exchange accounts. So they did export the exchange mailbox from OC1, and imported that into his newly created MC1's exchange mailbox. That meant his old contacts were brought over, and a wipe/activate would not loose any data. At risk were book marks, hand held settings, etc.

Suggestion... Before trying to activate against the new BES, turn off the hand held's setting for wireless contact synch, use desktop manager and USB cable to sync the device's contacts to outlook on the new company's PC and its mail account (to get them to the new company's exchange server mail box), then wipe the hand held and activate it against the new company's BES.

Of course you will loose all other settings and data like book marks, memo's, tasks, etc. But you could do backup priot to wipe, then an advanced restore after the wipe, but before enterprise activation and selectively put some stuff back.

[eBoyDog]

Try backing up the BB with DM, bacup all the apps with BBSAK.

Wipe it, do a selective restore to restore the contacts, restore the apps with BBSAK.

Activate the device to the new BES, should be fine, just make sure that everything that is wanted from the backup is restored prior to activating on the new BES and you should be alright.

User should be aware that in many situations when leaving a company it's sometimes a normal process to issue a wipe command to the device from the BES so that no confidential info is retained by the former employee; even sometimes contact info is considered private information that isn't allowed to be retained once an employee leaves an organization.

If as you describe the former BES admin simply deletes the account then there's nothing that the old BES can do to the device once the account is gone but up to that point prior to account deletetion, BES has full control over that device.

As a BES admin, I have been instructed to nuke a former employee's device esp in the case when they have been dismissed under a less than ideal circumstances and it's not made the holder of the BlackBerry very happy.

[GlenB]

One other option - before moving the user from one BES to the other, connect the device to the new company domain using Desktop Manager and sync contacts directly into the users new mailbox using wired sync to Outlook. Then wipe the device, reactivate, and all the contacts will come down automagically.