Friday, May 25, 2007

Missing Device Phone Number fields in BB Manager

This is a simple question that has devolved into a mini research project ( like so many do!)

We are trying to reconcile carrier billing info with active BlackBerry users, and are finding many SIM card accounts we are paying data plans for but we don't know who is using the device or where it is.

I use the BB Manager to find devices by carrier phone number which is easy most of the time, however many accounts (229 out of 1905 or about 12%) do not have the "phone number" field populated in BB Manager, these are the accounts I am trying to track down.

Results so far:

1. I have discovered that the "My Number:" field at the top of the Phone app pulls directly from the SIM card's "Phone number" field. If present in the Phone app display, the "My Number:" field then populates the BB Manager account "Phone Number" field in the SQL database.

2. Interestingly, this field can be user edited via Options / Advanced / SIM Card / Edit SIM Phone Number. Also interestingly, it appears to be a display field only and does not change the phone number that the SIM card actually uses.

3. Normally this SIM Card "Phone Number" field is populated by the carrier during the provisioning process, and before they ship the SIM Card out. In some cases, however, they sloppily forget this step which results in a missing SIM card field, and thus an "Unknown Number" on the Phone app display, however the SIM & voice calling work just fine, as again the true number is encoded into the SIM and unrelated to the "Phone Number" SIM display field.

4. It is easy enough for the end user to edit and add their phone number if nonexistent, or change it if the number associated with the SIM is changed by the carrier.

The issue for me is that I don't want to try to contact >200 users and have them run through a manual process of adding this field with the proper number. I am looking for an automated way of pushing it out. There doesn't appear to be any hack for this, so I will have to contact the wireless carrier's and see if they have a solution.

2 comments:

Divya said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Divya said...

Hi,

Please provide the steps to add/populate the phone number field in the Blakberry manager.

Regards,
Divya