With the release of official support for Exchange 2010 and BES 5.0, I thought I would have another crack at getting Exchange 2010 to work directly with BES 4.1. This is instead of using an Exchange 2007 server somewhere in the mix.
I used Blackberry Professional Server in my testing, installed on Windows 2003 separate to Exchange 2010.
To my surprise, I have managed to get it working - with no interim servers used. A clean Exchange 2010 installation was used, along with BPS 4.1.3A (so not even the latest version).
In addition to the regular installation of the Blackberry Server software (so logged in to the machine as besadmin etc), to get things to work I had to do the following.
- Install Exchange 2010 rollup 1 on the Exchange server.
- Install the latest version of the CDO on the Blackberry server.
- Set more permissions than normal (see below)
The server I was using also had a public folder store created and mounted. I have not tested it with Exchange 2010 without Public Folders.
During the installation there was an error about being unable to verify the permissions, which I ignored.
Tested Functionality
I have tested the following:
- Full over the air Enterprise activation.
- Sending and receiving email from the device.
- Lookup against the GAL and the personal address book
- Adding a task from the Blackberry and seeing sync to the account.
- Adding a task from OWA and seeing it sync to the Blackberry
- Adding a calendar entry from the Blackberry and seeing sync to account.
- Adding a calendar entry from OWA seeing it sync to the Blackberry
Of course functionality that doesn't require Exchange - such as Blackberry Browser access to the intranet continues to work correctly.
Permissions
To get things to work, I had to set additional permissions. This may well be related to the change in the database model, which is now at the Org level rather than the server level.
Exchange 2010 View Only Exchange Admin.
This permission is no more, so the equivalent has to be set:
Add-RoleGroupMember "View-Only Organization Management" -member besadmin
Store / Server level permissions
The usual permissions used with Exchange 2007 set via the following command didn't appear to work:
get-mailboxserver | add-adpermission –user BESAdmin –accessrights ExtendedRight –extendedrights Send-As, Receive-As, ms-Exch-Store-Admin
I had to grant the permissions at the database level:
Get-MailboxDatabase |add-adpermission -user besadmin -accessrights ExtendedRight -extendedrights Receive-As, Send-As, ms-exch-store-admin
Get-PublicFolderDatabase |add-adpermission -user besadmin -accessrights ExtendedRight -extendedrights Receive-As, Send-As, ms-exch-store-admin
As the permission is being granted at the mailbox database level, if databases are changed/added/removed then the permission will need to be run again.
As always, the permission didn't take effect immediately, therefore I restarted the information store and the Blackberry services to get things to take effect.
CDO Installation
The latest version of CDO was used, which can be downloaded (At the time of writing) from this location:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e17e7f31-079a-43a9-bff2-0a110307611e&DisplayLang=en
