Friday, May 25, 2007

BES Domino 4.0 / 4.1 Interoperability Issues - Updated 6/1/07

I upgraded one of my main BES servers to 4.1 SP3 HF1 last weekend, but left the other two at 4.0 SP6 HF4. Since the DB Schema was upgraded, we needed to upgrade all of our BB Manager workstations to 4.1 as well.

Now, we are seeing an issue where, using the locally installed 4.1 Manager, we cannot provision a new user added to one of the 4.0 servers using the USB cable. The service books get assigned but the rest of activation / synchronization / prepopulation does not kick off. Wireless activation of new users on the 4.0 servers also seems erratic.

BTW, this upgrade was performed after getting the word at WES that 4.0 and 4.1 servers sharing the same SQL database is OK, since they have many larger accounts than ours and they can't expect them to upgrade 10's of servers at the same time.

Well apparently it is OK for existing users but not newly added users! RIM's tech's response now is: Well it can work but it is not recommended, and the "workaround" is to upgrade the remaining servers to 4.1.

Update 6/1/07: Apparently the tech I spoke with on this issue was incorrect, RIM verifies that they fully support a mixed 4.0/4.1 environment as they told me at WES just a few weeks ago. This issue with USB activation has to do with an identified bug in the 4.1 SP3 BlackBerry Manager console, which is fixed in the upcoming 4.1 SP4, but also can be worked around by downgrading to the 4.1 SP2 Manager console. Thanks to RIM for clarifying this for me.

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