[phil1995]

I have been fooling with the VPN on my original Storm and my Storm2 for over a year, and am happy to report I finally have it accessing the company BES with the carrier radio turned off (Using WIFI with no BES from carrier).

I called RIM tech support about 6 months ago, and ask them if you could access the BES without subscribing to BES through my cell carrier. They told me that it could not be done. However, I have now proved them wrong.

I recently took an international trip to the UK where I only had access to the BIS, not the BES and was able to retrieve my mail and access my company intranet over the WIFI-VPN.

Here are the steps I have taken to get it working.

1. First of all, you must have a blackberry phone with wireless capabilities to even have the VPN software on your phone (Options, Security Options, Advanced Security Options, VPN)

2. Set up your vpn for your company. In order to find the correct settings for my company VPN, I downloaded the vpn client ( Shrew Soft Inc : Home, this is also a 64 bit windows client for those need it) shrew soft for windows. I loaded the client with my company settings, however, it did not give me all of the information the blackberry required. I then went into the configurartion on Shrew Soft, and one by turned off the "automatic" settings until I got the VPN to connect. By doing this one at a time, I could then load the correct settings into my blackberry. I finally got the blackberry to connect to my company VPN.

3. Set up your wireless connection, and associate it with the above VPN Profile.

3. This is the point where I could connect to the VPN, but could not access the intranet or access my mail (when I called RIM).

Before leaving for my trip, I activated the BES and registered with my company BES. I now realize, that the problem I had earlier, was due to having not registered the phone with the company BES. Once my phone was registered, I could then access the network with the VPN over WI-FI with the carrier radio disconnected (I had no other options, no carrier in the UK will activate the BES on pay as you go sims).

To summarize above, in order to use your companies BES over WIFI-VPN without paying your carrier for the BES access, you must first activate the BES from your carrier, register your phone with the company BES. After that, you can then have your carrier stop your BES service and use the WIFI-VPN solution.

Let me make make this clear, this VPN connection is only available using the WIFI connection. You can not use the VPN with your BIS connection. This comes in handy for people like me who do not need a 24/7 access to email. I can usually wait until I find a hotspot to connect and it saves me $15 per month.

Hope this helps others.