Good evening gentlemen- I am new to this forum, so thank you for humoring me as I ask questions that have probably been asked before. I have scanned the web & FAQs for help with this, but am stumped.

Since having our third child in April, our family has been slammed. We have realized that we do not plan nearly enough & have decided to save up some money to buy some used Blackberry 7130e devices. I have already purchased one device (used) on eBay and am on the lookout for a second device.

Here's my technicals:

The BB will be the Sprint PCS 7130e. I will have two of them- one for me, one for my wife. We have an HP Pavilion laptop running Windows XP Pro. I currently use Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client & she uses Outlook Express. We have separate user profiles within Windows.

Here's what I want to do:

I'd like to be able to get a free or low-cost scheduler & task list that will work with the Blackberry 7130e (sync up). I am willing to pay for high-quality software if I need to. I'd like to have a setup where my wife & I can share our calendars and tasks with each other, but still keep them separate on the BBs. In other words, I would like to be able to "see" if she is busy during certain times, etc.

What's the best way for me to do this?

You can only have one task list, one calendar and one address book on a BB, not multiple. Everything would be integrated into one calendar, one task list and one address book on the BB.

If you are buying from eBay, you need to make sure that the seller has canceled their BIS account and released the PIN and IMEI for you to use with your email. Otherwise you will be getting their email, not yours. Also, if it was used on a BES, then the IT Policies need to be removed and the device wiped before you will be able to really use it.

As for syncing info, Outlook is by far the best for contacts and calendar data. There are some others, but I really don't know what they are since I use Outlook. You can not use T-Bird for sure. One of our resident experts shoudl be able to supply bit of info.

So I can only have one task list & one calendar on each BB device. OK, but can I use one Outlook program (perhaps under different user profiles on Windows- i.e. Windows startup > My profile > Launch Outlook > Sync BB) to have separate calendars and separate task lists for two different people on one computer?

Thanks

Yes, you can use multiple profiles in Outlook.
If you both login to a workgroup with unique logins, XP creates a unique profile that will separate your Outlook accounts. If you login both with the same user id on XP or Vista, then you will need to create unique profiles. These profiles will not be separate on the BB unless your going to use the 4.2 DM which will challange you as to which Outlook profile you want to use.

hmeister...

You'd really need hosted BES and Outlook for each of you but most hosted BES providers will include a copy with their service for this. Host BES typically runs about $20/account in addition to (does not replace) your BB data plan and voice plan.

With hosted BES you can't really see if she's busy or not from the BB unless you add her calendar items to yours. You could send meeting requests from the BB which she could accept (and they would then be on both of your calendars) or reject. Through Outlook on a PC you could easily check each other's schedules though.

Sharing wouldn't be a problem except that shared items don't show up separately on the BB. In other words, if you added her calendar and tasks as secondary folders to yours all of your calendar items and her calendar items would all be placed together on your BB (same for tasks). Our executive assistants are configured this way so they have acess to their exec's items on their own BB's. I'm really not sure how they can tell which items are theirs and which items belong to their execs.

You only have one task list, calendar, address book, and memo pad but they can be mapped to two corresponding folders on your PC.

OK, forgive my ignorance, but what exactly is BES?

OK, forgive my ignorance, but what is BES?