I have a customer with a blackberry 8703 and we put the company database on it with 8500 names. Many of the names don't appear if you search for them by typing the name in but if someone calls, you can find their contact info by selecting their name in the call log, indicating the entry is SOMEWHERE in the phone. Anyone have experience with this?

The contacts came out of ACT 6.0. I tried 2 different ways to sync. The first try was syncing with Companionlink direct to the phone. Second I tried syncing with Companionlink to Outlook and allowed intellisync to push it from outlook to the phone, same result as the first time.

As an expirement, you might try using Handheld contact to sync the data to the BB, then use it's function to export to the BB adress book. It has a free 14-day trial, so if that's all you want to do, it might work.

I'm hesitant to try yet another method, especially that software which seems to be very expensive.

Well, to do it once, would be within the 14-day trial... and therefore free
You might decide you like it

You might also try CompanionLink tech support and see if they know what's happening.

Or try the ACT! 6 sync that's included in the BB Desktop Manager

As a thought, does this happen with ALL contacts?
Company, First name and Last name fields?
Are they there if you scroll down the Address Book? If so and you open the record, do they appear ok?

There might be something funny in the data... so might show something if you can limit it to specific contacts or fields

As an update, someone else in the office asked me to sync the same huge contact list to their Blackberry but it was the 8830, a better model. It worked like a charm. I'm going to say the problem was capacity of the older model.

Another update. The guy finally killed his old blackberry and bought a curve. It also synced up just fine. So for anyone looking for a capacity number, the new blackberrys are good for 10K contacts.