newbie BES questions

[patrickarc]

I started with a new employer about a month ago and we use BES with Groupwise. Up front let me say that I am not the server admin and I do not know the version we are using. I've asked a lot of questions to our IT guy and he doesn't seem terribly interested in making our BES sync better. I have a few questions and figured one post to summarize was better than a bunch, so I apologize ahead of time for the length of this.

1. If I flag an email on my BB it does not show up in my inbox on the computer as needing follow-up. Is this a setting change?

2. If I pull an email from my inbox to a folder using my computer, it deletes it from my BB, but if I use my BB it just files it. Can I change this to be able to access foldered files from my phone?

3. I can't access any documents, which I thought was part of the deal, but obviously could be wrong.

4. I also can't save a file I recieve in email to my BB, unless its in my personal account. I thought with BES I should also be able to save documents.

I'm hoping to suggest some setting changes that can improve things a little bit, but given I have never worked with BES I wasn't sure that I was right.

Any feedback would be much appreciated.

[eBoyDog]

I'm a GroupWise (and BES) admin so perhaps I can offer some insight.

In a nutshell, it sounds as if your employer is running a older version of BES, 4.1 is common, BES 5 just came out so it may not be that you admin doesn't care, there's just a lot of limitations with the older BES versions.

1. If I flag an email on my BB it does not show up in my inbox on the computer as needing follow-up. Is this a setting change?

This sounds like BES 4.1 - Newer BES 5 for GW works just fine and 4.1 does not support flags

2. If I pull an email from my inbox to a folder using my computer, it deletes it from my BB, but if I use my BB it just files it. Can I change this to be able to access foldered files from my phone?

Sounds again like 4.1, I'm working with a couple users on message filing and even in BES 5, it's not always working correctly.

3. I can't access any documents, which I thought was part of the deal, but obviously could be wrong.

If you are referring to file shares on your intranet, this is a feature of BES 5, 4.1 does not allow remote file access and I believe you also need BB device OS version 5+ to allow this too in conjunction with a BES 5.

4. I also can't save a file I recieve in email to my BB, unless its in my personal account. I thought with BES I should also be able to save documents.

That might be a IT policy coming down from your BES, by default even with 4.1 this can be rescricted OR there's a file size limit of say 500Kb of how large a file attachment that can be downloaded which is very likely.

Again, it sounds like you are dealing with BES 4.x, in the GroupWise side we are the red haired step child of email systems, BES 5 for GW just came out a couple months ago and due to GroupWise server version requirments not to mention existing defects (mostly due to Novell) implementation of the newer BES 5 is very rare.

On a side note, it's perfectly normal for your admin to be leary of updating or investing in the newer version of BES for GW, Novell is in the process of being sold to a company called Attachmate and Novell's future is not clear much less GroupWise. Such has caused concern in my company and we are activly discussing if we will be staying with GroupWise.

Personally in features, security and reliability, GroupWise is much better than Microsoft Exchange but Microsoft has a much better marketing and media relationship than Novell has. It sad that the only reason that my group can come up with as a excuse to switch to Exchange is that everyone else has and we are getting into situations were software vendor applications only work with Exchange.