Ok, I'm pretty new to the BlackBerry stuff. My president got excited and decided that most of our workforce would now use BlackBerrys. However the guy is cheap so while everyone must use the BBs not everyone will own them, so the BBs are assigned to vehicules. I have 200 vehicules for about 600 people.

Furthermore, assignement of the vehicules are like the "musical chair" I do not know until thevery morning who is gonna have which vehicule.

I can assign an email to every person and an email to every vehicule. How can I get the BES to forward the email to the right vehicule?

Do the vehicules have e-mail accounts?

Yes, in the form of

The question is what address is going to recieve the email in each VEHICULE? If it is the VEHICULE'S address, it is easy assign each BB to each VEHICULE and then when joe goes to get in VEHICULE 1, give him that BB. If the BBs are going to be for the employee's email account, then it is more tricky and I would think Enterprise activation or use the Handheld configuration tool on the BES each morning for that particular user. That way, it doesn't matter what device they get. They can ride in any VEHICULE with any BB and get email.

We want to send an email to the worker's address because everybody knows what his email should look like, and for that address to redirect it to the vehicule's email, because not everybody will know who is using what vehicule.

I'm wondering if there is a way for the BlackBerry to know who is using the BlackBerry and make the relation between the worker's email and the vehicule's email

Of course, I'd rather not have to program a client. Are there existing tools?

From what I understand, every day, the workers would activate and enter their email right? Then there would not be a need really for the vehicule email?

That sounds like your asking for more work/troubles if you do it that way. I think you would be better off having a BlackBerry assigned to each vehicule. Two hundred changes each day just seems like to many ways for things to go wrong.

Ok then. So what I need is for the BES to know who's using a particular BlackBerry, and by knowing who that user is, I could guess his email and make the redirection. Maybe with LDAP? I got SUN JES.

Wirelessly posted (7130e VZW: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0) BlackBerry7130e/4.1.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/105)

Wow! There's really only one truly viable solution, isn't there? I mean, is there any other choice? Convince the boss to invest in the BBs.

What you are asking for "is" technically feasible. But,,, in reality it's not practical. At least not yet. I would think in BES 5.0 this could be more of a reality, because in 5.0 OTA is going to be the standard for every thing you do to the BB. Such as sync email, OS upgrades, app deployment, java based apps ect... You would want to ask admins of large scale BES environments if this is possible. Because large companies with lots of Blackberry users would be something like what you are trying to do.

At any given time in a large deployment there will always be users coming and going on a daily basis. Thus creating a constant changing user environment.

If I was forced into this situation I would create some type of Java app on the Blackberry to allow any user to login to the Blackberry. Then once the user is authenticated, the BES would push a download script to setup the user that just logged in. Kinda like what happens in a windows active directory environment.

I was thinking of this solution :

->1 BB email address per car
(since changing and reactivating every morning for 200 emails would be very long and too many chances something going wrong)

-> When the client knows which car he/she is going to get, creates a rule in his outlook/notes/whatever to transfer all emails (does he/she really need all emails ? maybe only some is better) to that car address

only problem - PIM data (notes, task, contacts) would not be there (since it is tied to the CAR address, not the personal one)


Maybe to alleviate this problem -> give persons access to those CAR mailboxes so they could copy important PIM data to it ( or use import/export route )

I like this approach.
I guess this could authenticate against a LDAP server right?
I would also think that my app would know on which particular device it is so I could pass along that information. The email correspondance could then be kept somewhere else and make the forwarding happen like that.

I would also convince the boss to invest in the BBs. Much less trouble.

Although we have a deal making the BBs free to acquire, I'd have to come up with a cost/benefit analysis. Monthly recurring fees vs one time investment

Today, they use cell phones these are tied to vehicules. It is because of the man to vehicule ratio. There'd be too much equipment standing idle and the boss is renowned for his tight cash management!

You could also script an import into AD every morning that would set all the user's email to forward to the correct car's BB.

Or, if you are a glutton for punishment, do it by hand yourself on the exchange server (assuming you have Exchange. I imagine you could similarly do something in whatever email platform you have)

BTW, the BES will never know who is in what vehicle. All the BES "knows" is what email address gets forwarded to which handheld, and it's up to you to tell it that.

Im afraid with could go with the 2nd option

A custom application who traps the blackberry Pin along with the user authentication.
the userid is kept in ldap along with the tech's associated email.

Using Domino agents, mailboxes ares scanned to redirect and forward emails.

Next challenge is to have the screensaver password match the ldap authenticated password. Wish me luck. Any ideas welcome.