1. JRSCCivic98's Avatar
    BlackBerry Support Community Forums - BIS Filter behavior includes implicit wildcard and top to bottom processing of rules - BlackBerry® Internet Service - BlackBerry Support Community Forums

    Anyone else think this is ********?

    This ranks right up there with Apple botching the ActiveSync code on FW2.0 when it came out where if you specified the email address on the Exchange setup on the phone where the case didn't match the case used for the email field in ActiveDirectory, all Calendar entries would sync to the phone as invites. (gee, since when is an email address "case sensitive")

    Come on, are we to believe that RIM programmers aren't smart enough to properly design a system that can do filtering correctly or do they simply just don't care? It boggles my mind trying to figure out how someone can overlook such simple design mistakes.

    Hey RIM, perhaps it's time some of your programmers went back to simple "if/then/else" programming techniques to learn how to deal with the proverbial "what if" probability aspect of your software.
    06-19-09 01:52 PM
  2. Radius's Avatar
    The implicit inclusion of a wild card is annoying I agree, it should need to be specified by the user as a wild card like *[email protected] and that I agree with.

    The one thing I only partially agree with is the rest of the article about inclusion and exclusion rules, this is not such a simple thing. I have done work like this before.

    The problem is the language used to describe the rules are very primitive but that is all most users are willing to understand. The best way is to use regular expressions and then one single rule will do all the things he wants done in the last example and it really isn't too hard.

    But unfortunately there is a bit of a learning curve there so I guess RIM decided to leave that kind of functionality out. I can understand why.
    06-19-09 01:58 PM
  3. JORB's Avatar
    Woooowwww. Pretty pathetic. You would think they could fix that entire issue in less then a day.
    06-19-09 02:00 PM
  4. JRSCCivic98's Avatar
    Can you imagine if you had antispam software that functioned as antiquated as this? They need to redo this and require the specification of "*" in front as a wildcard. WTF... that's how EVERYONE else does it.

    I also don't agree with the "canned" emails they send out on BIS when an account needs to be validated. If your password didn't change you don't need to type in the damn password to validate the account. (It could have become invalidated due to a server down issue with the email server for the account in question.) I hate them not having dynamic capabilities for any of their products. I honestly don't understand why people still think that RIM is at the forefront of the industry when a lot of their infrastructure is based on loose architecture and programming techniques. Proof positive that people just don't look beyond the surface when they gauge a product and/or service.
    06-19-09 02:08 PM
  5. Radius's Avatar
    Can you imagine if you had antispam software that functioned as antiquated as this? They need to redo this and require the specification of "*" in front as a wildcard. WTF... that's how EVERYONE else does it.

    I also don't agree with the "canned" emails they send out on BIS when an account needs to be validated. If your password didn't change you don't need to type in the damn password to validate the account. (It could have become invalidated due to a server down issue with the email server for the account in question.) I hate them not having dynamic capabilities for any of their products. I honestly don't understand why people still think that RIM is at the forefront of the industry when a lot of their infrastructure is based on loose architecture and programming techniques. Proof positive that people just don't look beyond the surface when they gauge a product and/or service.
    I would love to know how you come to the conclusion that RIM has loose programming practices. From what I have seen they're pretty solid.

    As for dynamic capabilities, been there done that with my own software. It's a nightmare and creates massive security holes. The idea behind a BB is security so they take a slightly more archaic approach which protects them completely.
    06-19-09 02:12 PM
  6. Radius's Avatar
    Woooowwww. Pretty pathetic. You would think they could fix that entire issue in less then a day.
    This is far from a simple issue, the priority of filters I mean.

    You can think of how it SHOULD work but hte question is, does it work well that way? And will people understand it? The only problem I see is the implicit wild card, that should be patched immediately.

    But the rest is a tricky issue.
    06-19-09 02:14 PM
  7. JRSCCivic98's Avatar
    ^^^ They're not as tight as you think. And by loose, I don't mean security loose, I mean simplistic black/white "I put the blinders on when I thougth of this concept" loose. Does that make more sense?
    06-19-09 02:15 PM
  8. Radius's Avatar
    ^^^ They're not as tight as you think.
    I still want examples. Compared to other firmware developers I've seen it is pretty good. The security is excellent and most of the issues come in from 3rd party apps.

    Yes, it's far from perfect but overall it's a solid product. And no, I won't get a job there either as I gave up the firmware game years ago.
    06-19-09 02:17 PM
  9. Radius's Avatar
    Ah, missed that while I was replying.

    There's no way the decision was black and white, this would have been peer reviewed and debated until the issue died just like every other design meeting I've been at. I suspect they just chose the lesser of all evils when implementing it but made the fatal mistake of not documenting it well enough during release.

    Been there, STILL doing that. Is my boss reading this?
    06-19-09 02:18 PM
  10. JRSCCivic98's Avatar
    I still want examples. Compared to other firmware developers I've seen it is pretty good. The security is excellent and most of the issues come in from 3rd party apps.

    Yes, it's far from perfect but overall it's a solid product. And no, I won't get a job there either as I gave up the firmware game years ago.
    Yes, I agree. Their overall principal is solid. What they lack is conceptual thinking. (from my point of view anyway) I don't think they spend enough time thinking of their designs in terms of "what would a user do or not do". I've seen it enough with the software bugs in the BB OS (a lot of it on the Storm here recently). Again, they think in a linear fassion and this isn't always good for certain products. They need to reevaluate their designs from multiple viewpoints and that, I belive, will help them improve their products in the future. Right now, they're dictating to the user of how or what the user should do. They need to change that to be, what could a user do and how will our product or solution behave if such a condition was to be presented? This is why I mean by dynamic product design.
    06-19-09 02:23 PM
  11. JRSCCivic98's Avatar
    Ah, missed that while I was replying.

    There's no way the decision was black and white, this would have been peer reviewed and debated until the issue died just like every other design meeting I've been at. I suspect they just chose the lesser of all evils when implementing it but made the fatal mistake of not documenting it well enough during release.

    Been there, STILL doing that. Is my boss reading this?
    I know, right? Let's have a meeting to plan a meeting about having a meeting to decide on when to have another meeting. Been there done that too.
    06-19-09 02:24 PM
  12. Radius's Avatar
    You are advocating the "agile design methodology" which is actually a good thing, the user has more input on the final product as the developer interacts with the customer.

    The customer not only being us, but management as well by the way.

    It allows for faster responses to what a user would like to see, a good method that I am currently engaged in.

    Having said that, you can't please all of the people all of the time. I know the Storm has problems though, it's a new device and a completely new OS so I can understand teething problems. More testing should have been used for certain and I hope the Storm 2 learns from this and comes out as a solid product right out of the gates.
    06-19-09 02:26 PM
  13. Radius's Avatar
    I know, right? Let's have a meeting to plan a meeting about having a meeting to decide on when to have another meeting. Been there done that too.
    Hah! Yep, sounds like a plan. I prefer the pub meetings though, far more productive.
    06-19-09 02:27 PM
  14. JRSCCivic98's Avatar
    But anyway, the wildcard thing needs to be changed. I don't think (if documented with examples) it would confuse anyone that if you want to wildcard domains or names at a certain domain that they should specify "*" in front as part of the syntax. It's already widely used in the tech industry and I think believing that users are too stupid to understand it is not correct.

    As for the order of the filters, perhaps a simple up/down moving order of the filters could be implemented. Again, it would take some redesigns of the BIS portal pages, but it can be done. There's a lot of antispam solutions on the web who's designers depend upon web-based interfaces to control them. If they can do it, so can RIM. I just think they're profiling their userbase too much as non-intelligent people. (Maybe it's true of some, we do have some pretty silly questions on this site sometimes... ), but to think that someone can't make heads or tails of a "meaningful" interface or BIS account error emails is bullmarkey. People can get it, it just needs to be explained better.

    I used to a long time ago deal with users in a black and white fassion. By this I mean that if they asked why something didn't work a certain way I used to give them simplified answers and push them to do things in the only way it would properly work. What I found is that those users would continue to make the same mistakes over and over again and it was a neverending battle. The way I fixed is was to forget about trying to force them to do the correct procedure, but rather to take the time (the first time) to explain to them why something wouldn't work in the fassion that they wanted it to work (sometimes you have to use simple examples to do this) but in the end, the user now understood the idea behind the concept, so it made perfect sense to them as to why they should do it the correct way.

    It's like telling a kid not to do something and when they ask "Why" you tell them "Because I said so". That never works. What works is explaining the possible outcomes (good or bad) of what they are doing. Help them understand the possible reasons why they should or shouldn't do something and they'll understand why the parent asked them not to do it in the first place.
    06-19-09 02:36 PM
  15. CountCrackula's Avatar
    Once again, an issue that matters to people like us but for Joe Executive, who barely knows how to dial the damned thing, it won't matter at all.
    No dev team is perfect and RIM's is no exception. Still, I would take RIM over WinMo any day....
    06-19-09 02:38 PM
  16. Radius's Avatar
    It's like telling a kid not to do something and when they ask "Why" you tell them "Because I said so". That never works. What works is explaining the possible outcomes (good or bad) of what they are doing. Help them understand the possible reasons why they should or shouldn't do something and they'll understand why the parent asked them not to do it in the first place.
    Actually our tech support here has a new tactic, we stop explaining to the users all the options and just tell them "this is how it's spec'ed to work, so it's up to you what you want to do with it". Cuts down on the number of calls we get these days.

    There's an unlimited number of possibilities for how to do things, I guess it's just a matter of what fits with their current system. Personally I'd love to see behind the scenes at RIM and observe how things get done and why they make decisions like this.
    06-19-09 02:50 PM
  17. JRSCCivic98's Avatar
    Once again, an issue that matters to people like us but for Joe Executive, who barely knows how to dial the damned thing, it won't matter at all.
    No dev team is perfect and RIM's is no exception. Still, I would take RIM over WinMo any day....
    I think this post couldn't have nailed the issue more. I think RIM's stuck in the methodology that "IT Admins" are the ones dealing with these issues (after all, a lot of their clients are BES customers and were in the past). However, since they didn't change this way of thinking quickly enough to supersede the consumer base grouth they've had in recent years, they're now running into these issues because a lot more of the "average joes" are the ones administering their own BIS account.

    Take for example the way Verizon does email setup on the handsets. You run the email setup wizard and setup your emails, but they don't force you to create a username and password for BIS to manage those account. Ok, what happens when you change the device? That's right, without a username and password created, you can't go into BIS and services and do a Switch Device. So, what happens? The user gets the replacement BB and sets up the email accounts again on them, inturn leaving behind a BB PIN association to their email account floating out there in RIM land. RIM indicates that once the PIN is stripped from a user's voice account on the carrier's network that the previous (now non-used BIS account) gets autodeleted in 24-72 hours... supposedly. Well, guess what... it doesn't happen. I've singlehandedly seen multiple BIS server attachments to the same email account on a server when something like this happens. It's further been backed up with evidence that a user sells their old BB to someone else and the new person starts receiving the old user's email still because the old BIS account association didn't purge itself.

    T-Mobile for example doesn't do this. They link your online account management for your phone services to the BIS account for Blackberry management. So what happens is if you do have to get a replacement BB, when you try and run email setup from the handset on the new one, you get a nice little prompt that indicates your PIN/Device seems to have changed and asks if you'd like to make the change on the BIS system to reflect this. You click "Yes" and boom... your BIS account email setups are migrated from the old PIN to the new PIN (on the new device) and service books are sent. Streamlined baby... no need for the user to call support to ask what their username or password is for BIS management, only to find out they never set one up... calls that VZW sees a lot of on a daily basis just for this.
    Last edited by JRSCCivic98; 06-19-09 at 03:03 PM.
    06-19-09 03:00 PM
  18. Radius's Avatar
    The last point is fine for quick and easy, but is far less secure if someone gets a hold of your password. Because of this they tie the PIN to an account to make sure the actual owner is the only one that can do the switch.

    Yes, more annoying, but far more secure IMO.

    But for me I don't normally ever change devices so it's not a bother so far. Maybe in the future I will be rather upset about it.
    06-19-09 03:29 PM
  19. Radius's Avatar
    JRSCCivic98: "Don't be a CEO, Search the Forums!"

    Just noticed that, great one!
    06-19-09 03:29 PM
  20. JRSCCivic98's Avatar
    The last point is fine for quick and easy, but is far less secure if someone gets a hold of your password. Because of this they tie the PIN to an account to make sure the actual owner is the only one that can do the switch.

    Yes, more annoying, but far more secure IMO.
    I think you misunderstood. The PIN association to the account is not a problem... at all. It's the fact that VZW doesn't force the user to create a BIS username and password to manage that account prior to just blindly setting up the email accounts on it. If you look at all the other carriers, they either integrate this feature with the online phone account management (i.e. like T-Mobile does it) or they force you to create a username and password when you run Email Setup from the phone (i.e. like Sprint does it). This keeps users from the possibility of not having the username and password setup for account management and swapping devices rendering the old PIN assocation/BIS account unmigratable to a new replacement device WITHOUT VZW support. I hope this makes better sense. The security of the setup is not at question here... as a matter of fact, VZW's way of doing it is even less secure because if someone steals the phone, they can run Email Setup and see the email accounts you have setup on it in BIS (if you've not already gone to Menu/Create Username in the handheld email setup app.) Anyway, I know these last two posts are a bit off topic, but still... if RIM's going to keep control of BES/BIS servers and accounts, they should push a uniform standard practice for these setups accross all carriers they cater to. It would save a lot of support calls... believe that.
    06-19-09 03:55 PM
  21. JRSCCivic98's Avatar
    JRSCCivic98: "Don't be a CEO, Search the Forums!"

    Just noticed that, great one!
    lol, thanks, but I can't take credit for that. Someone posted it and I asked their permission to use it. I think it's appropriate...
    06-19-09 03:56 PM
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