InGeniusBlog.com

(NOT me surfing)

Just back from Vacation in BC - excellent waves in Tofino for boogie boarding and lots of other great fun.

And, half-way through vacation, my new Blackberry busted. Nice failure mode - the backlight died - you could see the text on screen, if you squinted and held it to the light just so… Then, I cleverly figured out to reboot it, to see if that would magically fix the hardware (software nerds believe ANYTHING can be fixed by a reboot) - and when it started, it runs through some sort of self-test, determines that the backlight is dead, then refuses to boot!!! Rats.

The funny thing is that exactly a year ago, in Victoria, BC, I dropped my Blackberry into Victoria harbour (no, not on purpose).

So, this whole “Vacation in BC” thing is costing my a Blackberry a year.

And, you know, the only thing I missed was the phone - not the email or appointments. It was nice to be totally electro-dark for a while…

So, we still can’t send emails from our Blackberries. We tried for two days to fix this ourselves, and finally called RIM. Remember that this was a RIM Blackberry Enterprise Server installation that has been functioning flawlessly since it’s original (and harrowing) install.

Monday, after waiting for TWO HOURS, a support technician answered, and we were redirected to a knowledge-base article, then pretty much hung up upon.

And that didn’t fix anything.

Tuesday evening we called back, waited on hold for hours, then had a pleasant 2 hour call with a RIM tech support guy in Singapore, who went over our entire Blackberry Enterprise Server installation with us, then decided that the problem was actually a Microsoft failure, and directed us to a Microsoft knowledge-base article.

And that didn’t fix anything.

But, we’re a bit further. Apparently anyone with a Blackberry, who ALSO has admin priviledges can no longer SEND mail from their Blackberries.

What I can’t understand is that we’re having this huge issue, a local hospital is having this issue, but I don’t see it being reported anywhere in the blogosphere!

Update: WE’RE BACK!!!! Our blackberries can send mail again! We updated to the latest service pack (the brand-new SP2) on our servers, then updated some DLL’s (CDO files), re-ran the DST patch, ran the set-send-as script as mentioned in Matt Roberts’ comment. Note, we had run this script before, but it hadn’t worked. It all sounds pretty simple in retrospect, but it was quite the pain while in progress…