SBS Express, have a new user with new blackberry. Setting them up and initial syncronization they get the message on their 7250 that it cant sync their address book, but some of their contacts appear to be listed however.

Any ideas on what may be causing this?

Welcome to the forums.

I received this every now and then when activating a user's device. What causes that is that the user has a contact that is missing data in either the first name, last name, or company field. Those contacts will not sync from the client mail application to the BB.

most of my contacts do not have company field filled. So, if your statement is valid, i think it should be "either the first name, or last name."

Hope someone can reconfirm this. Thanks.

In my experience on IBM Lotus Domino/Notes is that BES doesn't like pushing/reconciling contacts that don't have the last name field populated. I had a number of users who originally migrated from regular phones who only stored the first name of their contacts. Conversely (and strangely) if the last name field was only populated and the first name field was blank, push/reconcile/activation behaved better.

I contacted RIM (via TSupport) and RIM's stance was that for best practices (and to have less problems down the road with future builds of BES) was to have all of my users populate all three of the first, last, and company name fields as this (as strongly suggested by RIM) will likely be a future requirement. This is just what I was told when I asked. Personally, on Domino with BES, I've only experienced the problem with a missing last name field. But I have communicated RIM's suggestions and guidelines to populate all three fields.

I have no idea on Exchange/Outlook w/ BES. One of the Exchange/BES resident tactical generals will need to comment on that.

We are on a BES server and on a new user receiving the error message "some databases failed to synch - address book."

I am on the same BES server and I have contacts without first names and without last names or without both and they do synch.

Any suggestions?

I see this when the user has a Personal Distribution List in Contacts. Is that the case?

There are two common issues that cause this error. Both issues can be resolved by manually editing the contact within Exchange/GroupWise/Notes.

1. You have created a contact that contains no name or company name.
2. There are invalid characters (#$@!%$"-,^") in the contact.

Most likely it's a Distribution list, the BES will not sync those. If the user is paranoid about it ..I usually:

make a sub contact folder
copy all current contacts into the subfolder
sync the Blackberry locally so it refills the main contact folder
put contacts into catagory view
let the user clean up his/her contacts
wipe bb and re-activate (syncing now clean / proper contacts)

Thanks for the info. I'll give it all a try.