For the longest time now my blackberry has not been synching my contacts correctly, for a while I thought it was the 4.5 beta OS running on my 8830 that was the cause of the problems, at other times I thought it was various versions of Notes 8 or Notes 8.5 Betas that might be the issue. I never really invested the time to fix it, and was hoping that if it was the 4.5 OS on the 8830 that the Storm would make the problem go away. No such luck. Today I was determined that I would get my Contacts back in working order on my Blackberry, so I took at look at my PIM Sync settings on my server, which I thought pointed to a Server based replica of my Contacts, much to my surprise it was pointing to my iNotes contacts (which have not been synched in a while). So I turned off Wireless Contact Synchronization on the device, and wiped out my contacts on the Blackberry, fixed my PIM settings on the server, and turned Wireless Contract Synchronization back on. Much to my surprise the same problem contacts appeared again, when I checked the server it had reverted back to my iNotes contacts. After the second time this happened I pinged a colleague of mine who pointed me to Blackberry KB15595. In BES 4.1 SP5 (4.1.5) a new feature was introduced to allow pre-populaton of PIM settings for iNotes users (contacts, journal). The catch is it is enabled by default, and apparently even overrides manual settings.
Overview The PrepopulatePIMForiNotesUsers registry key allows an administrator to control whether or not organizer data synchronization settings are automatically applied to new BlackBerry smartphone users who are using the IBM iNotes or IBM Lotus Domino Web Access template. Key PrepopulatePIMForiNotesUsers Location HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareResearch In MotionBlackBerry Enterprise ServerAgents Type DWORD Value(s) 0 – Disables pre-population of relative path to the BlackBerry smartphone user’s mail file for address book and journal 1 – Allows pre-population of relative path to the BlackBerry smartphone user’s mail file for address book and journal Not present – Allows pre-population of relative path to the BlackBerry smartphone user’s mail file for address book and journal
Now before you ask, I know that my iNotes contacts are problematic, that is a leftover issue I have from an old beta, which again I just have not put the time in to fixing. For now I am happy to have my contacts appearing correctly on my Blackberry again, will deal with my iNotes contacts another day.
Does this mean I’ll stop getting duplicate contacts since we’re on the same BES server?
On our 3 new BES servers, we didn’t realize that contacts would sync wirelessly. We previously had one older version of BES which the option was not available.
One day, we were moving a BB device from the old BES server and re-activating it on one of the new BES servers. At the same time, the user was getting a new BB device. We trying to setup the new device using the USB cable and BB Desktop Manager to sync his contacts.
Strangely, we couldn’t sync the contacts, we tried over and over again, re-installed BB Desktop Manager, and did alot of head scratching. Over and Over we got an error message.
Then we noticed that all of the contacts were already synced!!!
Then we noticed that there was a wireless sync option that was turned on by default – on the device that we had never seen before.
Upon further investigation, we have found that if a user is created on the new BES servers, and they already have at least one entry in the contacts view of their mail file, that the BES User registration process will automatically fill in their server name (in canonical format) and mail file location and sync their contacts wirelessly.
For some reason, if they have never synced their Personal Address Book with the contacts view in their mail file, the server and mail file are not automatically populated in the PIM sync section of the BES user account.
We have to go in manually and set the server (must be in canonical format) and the mail file location and teach them to manually periodically sync the PAB with their contacts view in the mail file.
We are using OpenNTF1.7b by the way, which has a contacts view and a “sync address book” button in the contacts view. I don’t remember if the default mail template has this or not.
Being able to sync contacts wirelessly sure beats having to install BB Desktop Manager for clients just to sync contacts in locations where we don’t have good desktop support staff.
Thanks for this! I ran into it today and this solved it for me!!