BlackBerry Lookup - The Details (Updated for 4.1 SP4)

After doing some troubleshooting on lookups the other day I discovered that there are now some additional fields that are returned via lookup, that were not there back in the 4.0 days when I posted my first post on this over a year ago.

Specifically, the Home Address fields have now been added, which is nice. Here is a lookup result that includes as the data the Notes Person document field names that the lookup pulls from for reference:


Please note two missing items from this lookup:

1) PIN is missing due to the test Person document not having a BlackBerry device

2) The "Fax: OfficeFAXPhoneNumber" lookup result is missing, though populated in the Person document. This is due to a known issue introduced in SP4 MR1 and scheduled to be fixed in SP5.


Now, onto something interesting that I wasn't aware of before. You are able to customize the lookup results to a certain extent, by using the 4 "User Defined x" fields present in the "Edit PIM Sync Global Field Mappings" command from the BES Manager. [I didn't think this was an option as I always thought that the Global Field Mappings had to do with Address Book synchronization, I never thought they would impact the lookup results.]

Simply choose an unmapped field, drop down the Device Field column field and choose one of the User Defined fields to assign it to:


In my test environment I have assigned the following custom fields:

User Defined 1 --> Assistant
User Defined 1 --> Manager
User Defined 1 --> Spouse
User Defined 1 --> Children

When I do this, I get the following lookup result:

I see the Assistant, Manager, and Spouse fields, but not the Children field I mapped. Perhaps there is an issue with the "User Defined 4" field not working correctly for lookups. Let me change the mapping of this field to "Department" and see what happens:

Interestingly, the Department field does come over. So perhaps it is not an issue with the "User Defined 4" field , but with the Children field not working correctly.

On a final note, the Comments field on the Person document can be multiple lines and all lines will show up on the BlackBerry lookup. So instead of the "User1:" etc mapping above you can create freeform text lines in the Comments field if you need them on the BlackBerry lookup. For example, I added two additional lines to the Comments field in the Person document, and here they are on the lookup:

I'm not sure what the limit on the number of lines or characters are for the free form text Comments field. I was able to put 60 lines of information in that field and they were all returned to the BlackBerry on a lookup, so there is quite a bit of information that could be stored here.

Well I hope this helps you customize your lookups so that you can give your users better information directly on their device. Now the greater problem is how to get all this good information from other sources, such as the HR database, into the Person documents in names.nsf in the first place. (Luckily for me that heavy lifting job was already done by our development team for another project.) Good luck!