BES4.0, Exchange 5.5, Outlook2000, Blackberry 5720.

We are currently upgrading our 200+ users to Blackberry Desktop Software 4.0. Some of our users have public folder contact information and we are able to synchronize if we create a phony subfolder in their personal contact folder. However, we are now noticing in some cases where the contact information is not accurate. One user has her contact records transposed, another user has 25 new contact records with the 'File As' field blank, and yet another user that had updated this one record five times in the past only to see this record appear as five new records with the unchanged information.

As anyone else experienced this problem?

I think this is a bug found in the Nextel BlackBerryOS 4.0.0.160 "beta".
(I feel it's kinda beta quality at 4.0.0.160)

Right now, the GPRS BlackBerries are at 4.0.0.185 and later (including 4.0.0.219), and the CDMA 7250 is at 4.0.0.204. Very stable BlackBerryOS versions, which fixes the problems you mention -- my sync is working perfectly now.

Unfortunately, it seems that Nextel is kind of slow releasing the stable 4.0 and still has the early somewhat-buggy 4.0.0.160 up...

See if you can put a bit of pressure on Nextel and RIM.... Nextel has the oldest 4.0 public release, and I feel that it is time that they update it.

You can workaround many of these issues, by making sure the mappings are configured appropriately, since one or two of the mappings are sometimes messed up. Sometimes the mapping for "Home Address" -> "Work Address" gets messed up when installing BlackBerry Desktop 4.0 on top of certain versions of BlackBerry Desktop 3.7 ... So please doublecheck that the "Home Address" mapping. That might fix about 1/3rd or 1/2 of your problems.

I ran into this problem, but solved that (even while I was still using the early 4.0.0.16X betas)

We are using the latest software release from Nextel (Desktop Manager 4.0.0.30 and Handheld Firmware 4.0.0.185). Both were released about three weeks ago.

By the way, when you upgraded to 4.0, do you have to do a manual uninstall first?