[captain pugwash]

Hi all,

I've been scratching my head a bit on this one - any help appreciated.....

We have deployed the Bloomberg for Blackberry application to a number of handhelds using the MDS push facility. This works no problem, however Bloomberg insist on releasing automatic updates each month. This is causing problems as the users are prompted to accept these updates which then download and fail to apply.

Bloomberg tech supp have stated that there is no way to stop these update notifications appearing and while the users can cancel the update process, they inevitably don't and raise support calls. Also, after 3 months the app is likely to stop working as Bloomberg only support the last 3 releases.

As far as I can see there are 2 obvious ways to fix this issue. One is to allow the automatic updates to be applied and the second is to write new software configurations each month after manually downloading and packaging the app and then redeploying this to the users. I have problems with both approaches.....

Approach 1 sounds like the easiest way, after all this is how Bloomberg have designed their app. While there were intial issues with the updates failing due to the 'Disallow Third Party Downloads' setting in our security policy, I have removed this. This now results in an issue whereby the application downloads all of the update sucessfully and then tries to overwrite the system files on the handhelds. This fails because the file signatures do not match, and I can't get around this. Is there something I can tweak so that crcs are not compared?

As a fallback, approach 2 would do....but in order to achieve this I will need to write a remove app software configuration, deploy this and then write a new config for the new version of the app and deploy this too. This all seems a little convoluted and likely to cause further issues. I cannto find a way to have 2 versions of the same app on the same BES (fortunately we have more than one BES though, but when I try and deploy the new version over the old it does not work.

I am using BES version is 4.1.3.16

Has anyone come accross this before? Is there an elegant way of upgrading an application version remotely, or even better, a way of allowing the app to auto update?

Thanks,
Captain Pugwash