So for the last 48 days, I’ve been getting my company email via GMail. On my Blackberry, that’s meant another GMail client account for the mail, and using Google Sync for Mobile to populate the BB’s calendar. The native email client on the BB was left unused.
That’s worked pretty well, all things considered. I’ve liked the GMail client on the BB, and the calendaring, after some initial hiccoughs, went pretty well.
Well, testing moves on, and the next step was volunteers to use the GBES setup. This is a Google add-on to the normal BES server that does the normal “push” of mail, etc., from Exchange to the BB. Okay, well, that’s fine.
One problem. Though the BB Google Sync for Mobile scenario caused some folks problems because of delays in the sync (up to 15-30 minutes), the BES solution for calendaring is one-way — calendar gets pushed to the BB, but changes on the BB are not pushed back to the company calendar.
But, what the heck — this is a Pilot, not Production, so I should endure some inconvenience for the cause. “Well, Fred, you knew this job was dangerous when you took it.”
One bigger problem. The instructions start with “how to Wipe Your Blackberry.”
Hrm. Wow, that sounds like something I don’t want to do.
After some poking and prodding and Googling, I was assured that I could do the Wipe process and not lose any third-party data and applications. Indeed, the wipe (unless you tell it otherwise) just cleans out the device’s Blackberry data stores, so it shouldn’t be a problem, right?
*sigh*
First off, the wipe, even with explicitly leaving the little checkbox about third party apps unchecked, still takes an ungodly amount of time. Not only is it deleting the files, it’s overwriting each bit X times to keep it safe and unreadable.
Second, the Enterprise Activation process also takes forever. It also aborted the first time out.
After which, it simply produced (when trying to restart the Activation) “An error occurred. Please contact your System Administrator.”
So I did another wipe. Insert ungodly amount of time (again) here. Like, two hours this time watching it go through its wipe routine. And then the same thing happened.
I am not amused.
So off with a message to the support folks to find out WTF.
For the record, they reset the account on the company side and it all works fine.
More annoying is that I’m now subject to newly instituted BES-based Blackberry security, including an 8-byte password that locks the system. Oh, and I *really* miss threaded messages.