I run BES 4.1 on Exchange, what we want is something central to manage a main list of company contacts (like a public folder contact folder) which can sync down to the Blackberries, I've looked at ITrezzo before but was quite expensive and wondered if there are any alternatives is anyone else doing something similar another way?

Under BES 4.1.x you would need a third-party product to do this, AFAIK.

There is kinda a fudge way (at least on Domino) to push the corp address book to devices, but it pushes it in place of the user's personal address book, and I don't know whether your users would like that. Mine certainly don't. So they are stuck with a local PAB on BB, and having to lookup for corp data.

Exchange is the same you can perform lookups on the Exchange equivelent (global address book) but this isnt what we actually want.

What we want is to push down a separate contact list which the source will be a public folder contacts list which will be centrally administered and updated, will contain client contact info etc (not internal staff, we have that via the GAL already)

Well, I am no expert on Exchange, but from what I know of BES, you will need a 3rd party product, if one exists.

Maybe the Exchange BES Admins can help out a bit more...

Look here at what we did, but now with 80+ users doing it.

push Contacts to users

Also if on outlook 2003 you could try Outlook PCS

thanks Knottyrope, I just looked at that, so your guys manually copy over the contacts from a public folder to their local contacts and then on the handheld they sort by category, am I understanding that correctly?

Sort by category is used in outlook to delete the right contacts when updating

Have not tried sort by category on a BB HH yet, but it does work on WM devices.

Just create contacts in AD, they'll show up when you do a lookup. I'd hate to have to sort through eleventy billion contacts on my BB.

AD lookup slow
Not enough fields
does not work in limited signal strength

People are used to using contacts not a weird clumsy slow lookup thingy.

In AD my user info is this

Name
Email
Dept

thats all.

Only HR can modify the contacts in the public folder and it looks like contacts like they use all flarpping day long, No showing how to use AD and possible wreck something, everyones has it added to favorites and sync in cached mode and they get contacts that look like their own contacts. This is a consistant interface that everyone can use, even the un-ed-juh-ma-kay-ted ones love it. Sending a contact as vcard is easyier too. I even had a few compliments from people that used to use AD in past jobs. One even asked why global address list had no info in it. He liked my idea better after.

problem is what my guys want is an auto service not to have to manually drag updates down to the berry/outlook.

I think ITRezzo or similar is going to be the only way to do this.

Eleventy billion? Does NASA host your GAL for you .

I think that's my new favourtite number, it was a Gajillion.

Well,we all know gajillion isn't a real number :p

I just meant that I personally as an IT person wouldn't want the names of all of the sales contacts on my phone. I don't know how many more fields you get with contacts than you do with an AD contact since you can map it however you want.

Yeah I know what you mean. I do know what knotty means but for us lookup gives us enough and is pretty reliable (too damn reliable when I SMS a sales contact instead of my Mum!).

AD vs Central contact list

Too funny man!