I recently took a new position at my work and with that comes helping to support blackberries for some of our employees. I'm relatively new to BBs so i have few questions.

First, here's some basic info. We run off a BES and use Lotus Notes for our mail client. We support 7230, 7290, and 8700G models. Our primary carrier is T-Mobile but a few user's have others. We use Desktop manager 4.2.1.8.

My first question: Is there any way to change the auto lock timer on the device or is that set by the IT policy?

Second: When new users are set up and go through enterprise activation, they do their first time synch and it pulls their contacts, calendar, and tasks over tot the device. I am constantly being asked how to pull the contents of a folder (ie. inbox). For the life of me I cannot figure out how to do this. The device will recieve any new messages received after the activation but I cannot force the old messages to come across. All old calendar entries come across, but not messages.

Third: This one is more for me. I use the Ramble IM application. In order to get this app to work I have to go to Options / Advanced Options / TCP. I then have to enterwap.voicestream.com in the APN field. After entering the app is accessible. However after a few hours, I'll go to log into the app again and I'll get a tunnel error because the APN field is blank. Is there any way to stop that field from being wiped or is that also a part of the IT policy?

Thanks.

Email doesn't sync on Blackberries. EA actually should push out some old messages and the amount of old messages can be adjusted by the BES admin. I'm not sure what the limit is but no one will gt all their old email unless they've been around for maybe a week or less...

The auto lock timer is controled using IT policy.

The BES EA pushes out the last 200 messages or 5 days whichever comes first. This is configurable on the server.

i always found that if you delete the users profile on the BES Manager and then re-create the profile, and then do enterprise activation, it syncs everything in the inbox.

If the profile is not deleted and you sync the profile to say...a different handheld it will just sync the items from that moment on, it wont sync everything...

delete the profile and re-create it..then activate the handheld.

This is not entirely accurate.
The message pre-population from BES has a limit on how much mail it will put on the device after a new EA.
As user x14 indicated, the default is 5 days or 200 messages, whichever is larger.
The maximum is 14 days or 750 messages... whichever is larger.

It will not sync old messages. But if for some reason they need an old message on their device they could just forward it to themselves. Then it would be on the BB. I don't see why that wouldn't work. Not ideal, but most likely your only option.