[DTSBES]

We upgraded our two BES servers to 4.1 last night from BES 4.0 sp3 hotfix 4. This is the first functional release that is Exchange 2003 sp2 compatible (BES 4.0 sp4 hotfix 2 is very buggy and the techs we spoke to do not recommend going to this release).

Observations:

We access the BES servere via SQL authentication. Per RIM technical support one requirement of the upgrade is to have the SQL server in a domain for NT authentication during setup. We could have dropped the SQL server into the domain but we want to plan this out so we had to copy the database from the SQL server to a local MSDE database, complete the upgrades, and then copy the database back to the SQL server.

ODBC is replaced by JDBC in this release, a driver for JDBC will need to be installed on the Blackberry server prior to upgrade to 4.1.

Per RIM technical support older devices such as the 6510 may still work with the upgrade but new features in new releases will not be supported on the older devices. We are trying to get some documentation from RIM when they plan to have what devices go off support. From our understanding the 7510's are next and we have a lot of those.