Public folder sync - wirelessly?
 

I have searched and found many threads on this but nothing that quite fits what I need.

What my company wants is to sync not only the mailbox contacts but also a public folder wirelessly

So personal contacts in your mailbox and a maintained company list in public folders.

I have heard rumours of this coming in BES 5.0 but wondered if anyone knows of a way of doing this now either by something clever or using a 3rd party application?

Currently public folders of any kind cannot be synced wirelessly. There are runors of BES 5.0 doing public folder sync, so I would wait for that. There are no third party solutions that I am aware of that will accomplish this as well.

Hope this clarifies things for you.

thanks for the response, if not wirelessly do you know of something which will do this over the cable?

If they have the public folder available in their outlook they can use Desktop Manager to sync it via USB. They will have to go into the sync settings and select the public folder instead of their Address Book and also set it for one way sync, outlook to the BB only. Before this will work they will have to turn wireless sync off for the address book on the BB because a wired sync will not work while the wireless is enabled.

Use the following KB for instructions:

BlackBerry Search Results

This should help.

thanks, problem is the key word there is 'instead' what we need is 2 separate lists.

need people to be able to both way sync on their own mailbox contacts but have download one way sync from public folders as well.

to be honest am not surprised if this isnt possible I have looked into it for a while and found nothing which matches the requirement.

Just a fyi on public folders. MS is trying to move away from public folders to Sharepoint. The default install of Exchange 2007 will not install public folders at all and the next version of Exchange will not have public folders.

from what I've read, E2k7 with Outlook 2007 will provide full support for Public Folders and MS will continue support for PFs until at least 2016 (i could be wrong though) However, as marduo stated, MS will eventually move away from public folders. We still see a lot of clients however who continue to use PFs and this functionality (access from the blackberry) seems to something many are looking for.

I heard a rumour that someone out there is working on something that will provide access to public folders... can anyone guess ;-)

Cheers,

Shayne

do tell?

yes, please tell us what you know. Today was the first time I have had a need for this (getting public folder info on a blackberry), but in my limited searching, I have found it's a common gripe 2-3 years in the making! What a coincidence that it's being discussed just a day ago.

thanks!
Adam

Yea ever since blackberry provided wireless sync this as been a problem. Everyone wanted the benefit of wirelessly syncing their personal contacts but then lost syncing from our corp contact list which is in public folders. I have to teach everyone how to copy from public folders up to a subfolder of their personal in order to maintain a sync'd corp list.
anyway, yes exch 07 did try to do away with public folders but after the outcry SP1 for exch07 brought them back. I'd imagine maybe the next version of exchange they will try to get rid of them again.

Regardless, RIM needs a way of providing corporations with wirelessly public contact sync for business addresses whether that is through public contacts or some other global list. No one in my company considers doing a GAL lookup every time a viable solution as it can double the time it takes to type a quick mesg to someone. Gal lookups are prob the only solution for companies with thousands of employees but if you are in the 10-500 range (and there are many there) you can easily sync it all to your BB.

Hitting your Public Folders with the Browser
 

Given the fact that you can't synch a public folder contact list wirelessly...

each Public Folder in Exchange (and SharePoint, for that matter) has its own URL...that includes Public Folders that contain Contacts, e.g. http://exchangeserver/public/mygroup/groupcontacts.


The Browser, assuming it can get to such a page, recognizes the contacts' phone numbers and E-mail addresses as phone numbers and E-mail addresses. So far so good.


My test started with enabling http authentication on the MDS Connection Service and testing with some older and newer models. It stopped working after the 7290. For some reason anything newer than that could not get authenticated.

Does anyone have their BlackBerry Browsers set to bring up such a page? If so, does it work with all models?

this worked for me on an 8703 and is exactly what I was looking for!

That works slick as a whistle. Just what I was looking for to view the public calendars - one tip: use IE pocket emulation on the Blackberry Browser. Using IE emulation caused it to just hang at "loading views"

And another thing, if you have spaces in any part of your web address you have to use %20 in place of the spaces. i.e. http://exchange/public/our%20calendars/IS%20Admin

And I was testing on an 8800 -no problems

I'm not sure of your problem. What you just said is very possible when using the usb cable and the desktop manager. This is exactly what our company does to sync contacts. They sync their personal contacts both ways within their personal contacts in Outlook and they sync one way with a corporate contact list in Public Foldres

There is a solution that might be of interest to exchange customers. If you own exchange you can use add2exchange by diditbetter.com. My company also has this avail as a service on our hosted exchange platform. The software can sync public to public, public to private, private to private for contacts, calendars and tasks.
Hope this helps.. it's the only solution that works well with any mobile device as it is an exchange server side sync.

does it do this wirelessly?

If you have a Blackberry enterprise server then that will do the wireless syncing. This application does the syncing between users folders or public and users folders then the BES syncs those changes from your personal folder to the blackberry.

Have a read of this thread.

http://www.blackberryforums.com/bes-...gal-issue.html

I have a customer with a similar issue. I figured someone must have sorted this out...

There is a 3rd party that has a product that does this. It will sync public contact lists to the handheld wirelessly. It adds an application on the handheld, and inside that you can pick the public folder you want to access.

Check out Wallace Wireless » WIC Contacts

I just re-read this and noticed the key word "OR" between user folders OR public folders, so this solution can do one or the other.

What we want in my organisation is to be able to wirelessly sync 2 separate folders.
1: Users own contacts for personal stuff. (sync both ways)
2: A company master contact list in public folders. (sync one way down to blackberry only)

I dont think its the end of the world if this all ends up in one contact list on the blackberry itself but we need to keep control of the public folder master list.

With the app you mentioned can this be done?