My Job involves a lot of installing, upgrading and migrating BES servers for our customers.
When BES 5 arrived and I found out about the transporter service I praised the heavens. It would save me so much time and make my job so much easier.
However I have quickly found out this was not the case. I spend more time fixing the problems it causes and apologising to customers.
Common problems
Transporter reports successfull migration, all the users have gone from the old server but nothing on the new server. All Blackberry functionality goes for all users.
Duplicated contacts, for no reason every single user will have all of their contacts duplicated. A known issue which RIM admits. The fix? delete the users re-add them and take them through an EA.
Brilliant! so that's 300 enterprise activations to run through, they very thing that the transporter is supposed to avoid!
RIM should have canned this a long time ago. When it works it's great but when it fails more often then it works then they should have shelved it until they could make it more reliable.
For those planning to use this tool. Make sure you have a test account you can test it with. test it, then test it again, then test it some more. Even after you have done all of that and it all seems to be OK be ready for it to fail when you start moving everyone else
It doesn't discriminate against certain Handheld codes, If it messes up it messes up for everyone. no matter what version they're running .
As a footnote I would like to add that my thoughts so far are a summary of my personal experience. Results may vary. If you only ever use they transporter once and it works for you then great.
For me this is the 8th time (yes I counted) that it's left me looking like a total idiot.
I used transporter to move approx 100+ users off of a BES 4.x to 5.x
The main issues I had was duplicate entires for the users. The best thing I found was to default users to the default it policy move them over using the default policy and then applying them the correct groups/policies after the move.
Once I did it that way I had no issues. I did them in groups of 10 over a few hours. hope this helps.
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New to BES admin role
Running version 5.0
Working to migrate users from our 4.x enviorment
300 devices
have to chime in here. couldnt agree with stainless steele more!
my first 20 users i transported right into my company it policy on 5.0 and all those users kept receiving "no message service configured" and couldnt send any emails.
tried to resend the service books, it policy, didnt work.
from the handheld, tried to regenerate key, delete/undelete desktop[cmime], nothing worked. had to wipe handheld and re EA users.
so, had to transport users into default policy. once they were on 5.0 successfully then assign them my company policy. did this for more than 300 users.
Good to know. I have plans to migrate about 350 users (all top execs) from a bes that we currently outsource to one that will be in house. Any other tips regarding the transporter would be greatly appreciated.
MarshBklyn - you were good to go after the first 20 users?
I used the BB transporter to move over 350 users. I tested for a month before I started any moves with my account then a few others in the IT dept. What I found was to create groups and IT policies on BES 5.0 before I started the move.
I moved about 50 to 75 users at a time. I let all users go into the default IT policy and group for the move (In BES 5.0). There was a little more managing once they were in BES 5.0. Putting them in the right groups and assigning IT policies but the managing multi users helped out a lot here.
Out of all the users I only had to EA 3 users. All others moved without any issues. I was pretty impressed with how painless the process was. Sorry for everyonexxx8217;s troublesxxx8230;xxx8230;.
The source BlackBerry® Enterprise Server and the destination BlackBerry Enterprise Server must use the same encryption algorithm: AES, Triple DES, or both AES and Triple DES.
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I had to fall
To lose it all
But in the end
It doesn't even matter
BES Transporter making my life hell.[RANT]
