Microsoft Exchange and Remote Desktop Services Specialists

SEMblog

Microsoft Exchange Server and
Blackberry Enterprise Server news, views and fixes.

Blackberry 10 Simulator

If you are curious to see what the Blackberry 10 device is all about, or you need to support it, then the simulator is probably a good choice. This is available free of charge from the Blackberry web site. 

The simulator usually has a more advanced version of the OS than currently available, as it is designed to help developers get ready for the new OS. 

At the time of writing this means 10.2.1 which includes the Android emulation feature. 

System Requirements

Due to the installer Blackberry use, you need to have JAVA installed on the workstation. 

It also requires VMWARE Player or Workstation. 

Installation

The default location during the install is in My Documents. However if you decide to install it somewhere else, then you should run the installer Elevated. After installation the permissions can be out, so give Users full control to the directory where the VM is stored. 

The virtual machine installs with the network set to NAT mode by default - I prefer it to be connecting directly, so change the configuration before booting the VM.  

Use

It is a little slow to load, and do ensure that you have the latest video card drivers and a machine with Hardware virtualisation support enabled in the BIOS. However once loaded and you get your head around the "swiping" with the mouse, it is very quick. 

Once you have it loaded, don't forget to change the keyboard and language settings. I also found the time zone was wrong and the clock was six hours wrong as well, despite "automatic" time sync being enabled. 

Application Installation

You can access the Blackberry App World, you can also use third party App Stores, such as the Amazon App Store. However if required you can also sideload applications. There are various methods to do this, one of the easiest is to use a Google Chrome Extension, which is discussed here:

http://semb.ee/sideload

Exchange Connectivity

Of course as an Exchange MVP, one of the first things I wanted to try was connecting it to Exchange. This works perfectly, I was able to add it to my test Exchange 2013 server very quickly, and also to a test BES 10 server. 

Downloads

The simulator is free to download, and can be found at this link:

http://semb.ee/bbsim 

Twitter

As I have been been granted the trademark "Sembee", I have also changed my twitter handle to @Sembee . http://semb.ee/twitter

Nothing much on the twitter feed at the moment though. 

Stopping Auto Deletion in Mailbox Converted From a Resource

Recently at a client we configured some mailboxes as Resources. 
It was then decided that they would be better off as shared mailboxes, as they could be used for other tasks. Therefore the mailbox was converted to shared:

 

set-mailbox mailboxname -type:shared

 

However any emails sent to the new Shared mailbox were continuing to go in to the Deleted Items folder. This is the standard behaviour for a resource mailbox, as it is only expecting to get calendar items. 

The key is to disable the Calendar processing. You can see the current setting thus:

 

get-calendarprocessing mailboxname | select identity, AutomateProcessing

 

To disable it completely, you need to change the value of AutomateProcessing to none

 

set-calendarprocessing mailboxname -AutomateProcessing None

 

In this case, the folder still needed to accept and process calendar entries, so we changed it to AutoUpdate.

 

set-calendarprocessing mailboxname -AutomateProcessing AutoUpdate

 

The full parameters are discussed in the Technet article:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd335046(v=exchg.141).aspx

 

Kudos to Holly at the client for finding the value which I had completely forgotten about!

Cross Site DAG Issue When Using A Load Balancer

Just deployed a new Kemp Load Balancer with a client which promptly broke their cross site DAG.

Usual horrible error:

[PS] C:\Windows\system32>Get-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup -Status

WARNING: Unable to get Primary Active Manager information due to an Active Manager call failure. Error: An Active

Manager operation failed. Error The Microsoft Exchange Replication service may not be running on server XXX-3. Specific

 RPC error message: Error 0x6ba (The RPC server is unavailable) from cli_AmGetDeferredRecoveryEntries.

 

(server xxx-3 is the remote server).

Discovered that the problem was due to an option enabled on the Kemp called Enable Server NAT (SNAT). You can find this under System Configuration, Miscellanious Options, Network Options. Disabling that corrected the issue almost immediately. Seems that the NAT broke the DAG. 

Free BES 10 CALs when you Activate a Blackberry 10 Device

Looks like Blackberry are running an offer for free BES 10 CALs.

Activate a Blackberry 10 device and get two free CALs.

 

http://uk.blackberry.com/business/blackberry-10/blackberry-10-ready/license-offer.html

 

Activate a Blackberry 10 device between July 1st and August 31st 2013 and for each device you will get TWO free CALs. These CALS are the EMM Corporate type so will work for Blackberry 10 devices and Android/iPhone. At current prices they are worth almost £70 each.

 

The BES 10 software is free (trial download on the link above).

 

The window to claim the free CALs is quite small, so Blackberry have provided a link to be told when the registration process is open.