TIPS & TRICKS: Blackberry Enterprise Activation Duplicates

A user with a Blackberry connecting up to our Blackberry Enterprise Server was having trouble with syncing between Exchange and her mobile device. The device was originally configured over the wireless without ever plugging in to a machine and/or any desktop software. Everything had been functioning normally until recently. The Blackberry was not syncing over new appointments or contacts, though email was flowing normally. One other aspect was that there was an assistant to the user who also helped enter in contacts and appointments to the user's Exchange account. The appointments and contacts entered by the assistant were also not syncing onto the Blackberry. However, the information was showing up fine in the Exchange account through both Outlook Web Access and Outlook on a Windows machine.

One possible reason was that Exchange accounts were recently migrated from one store to another. A possible fix for this problem was to rerun an Blackberry Enterprise Activation to see if the Blackberry would reestablish the sync for contacts and calendar items. This did not work. The problem persisted.

The most drastic solution would be to wipe the Blackberry and rerun the Blackberry Enterprise Activation as if the Blackberry just came from the factory. However, I wanted to avoid this as the user had data residing on the Blackberry that was not backed up, especially since we did not create a connection between the Blackberry and any desktop software.

I finally figured out that there were duplicate contact lists and calendar lists. Somehow the Blackberry lost connection to the BES and when it did reestablish itself, it did not recognize that there was an existing list of contact items and calendar items. This is why there were only duplicates on the Blackberry, but not inside of Exchange. After some testing, I figured out which one of the calendar and contact lists were the actively synced lists and which were the ones with the lost connection. I configured the contact and calendar lists that lost the sync connection to no longer display (I may have even found a way to delete those lists after further investigation). This removed the duplicates. it's likely that a wipe and running of Enterprise Activation would have solved this problem. But, since we needed to find a more manual method, configuring the broken lists of contacts and calendars did the trick this time around.

Here's where I got my inspiration this time around:

http://www.blackberryforums.com/bes-admin-corner/122095-duplicate-contacts-after-new-enterprise-activation.html

Hope this helps you. Happy Computing.