Turtle Partnership Blog :: Tricking a Blackberry MSDE Db into sharing

03/18/2008

Part of the work I have been doing in Ohio involved building a new Blackberry server with a new organisational hierarchy and then moving 700+ users over without any reactivation. Not a problem if you're using SQL since you can easily move a user between BB servers that share a database store, but a pain if you're using local MSDE databases with 1 per server. A neat trick was to use the MSDE Manager tool (which cost about 30 USD) so I could get at all the MSDE databases, tables and security and easily create a new system account in the BESMgmt database granting the new server access during its setup. Then with the new 'shared' store used by both servers I was able to swap the devices between them with no user impact at all. Next step is my secret sauce for reassigning a Blackberry from one user to another without needing reactivation - it has worked well in testing and if (when!) it works live I'll be writing up the 'how to' here.

It has been a really interesting and fun project as well as my first opportunity to work with the guys at Teamwork Solutions who top the scale in professionalism and took the pain of project management away

Gabriella Davis | London | TrackBacks (0) | Comments (5)

Permalink | Bookmark :

Comments

1 - That rocks. I definitely may need this trick in the near future.

I also look forward to your trick on reassigning BB's without reactivation. I'm guessing it has something to do with changing the mail file field in the profile, then somehow manually switching to a new state database.

Posted by Chris Mobley At 11:57:43 AM On 03/19/2008 | - Website - |

2 - There is a merge function that comes with the BES installation code - tools directory (from memory) does a similar thing

Posted by Paul Mansell At 02:30:45 PM On 03/26/2008 | - Website - |

3 - Thanks but actually that tool doesn't do the same thing as what I need when building a new BES server

Posted by Gab Davis At 10:39:18 PM On 04/06/2008 | - Website - |

4 - MSDE Manager now costs just US$79.95 - they must have seen your blog :)

Posted by Jaime Alcorn At 12:12:55 AM On 04/09/2008 | - Website - |

5 - You can also use straight MS SQL Enterprise manager (if you have a full SQL implementation somewhere or CD's to hand) to make the changes to the MSDE instance security. I've just done similar to what you describe to move users to a new BES transparently and will then relocate the database at the end of the project.

Posted by Steve Seymour At 10:30:56 AM On 04/18/2008 | - Website - |