Category Archives: SBS

Some of you may know that I picked up a Blackberry 8100 (also known as the Pearl) in early December. As a cell phone the device has been great. Voice quality is clear and signal strength has been really good wherever I used it. For email I was just using the Rogers Blackberry Internet Service which gave me the ability to create a default blackberry address and then add up to 10 POP email accounts to the device. The problem with this was that I could not control when the mail was picked up. Another issue I had was that while I could connect and get mail from my own exchange server (SBS 2003 server at home) via Outlook Web Access, I could not use the calendaring feature of exchange.

If you are not aware there are actually two ways that a Blackberry can work. The personal option is the BIS service offered above, while most corporations use Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) to send and receive emails, synchronize calendars and address books with their corporate email systems. I always thought that BES was a very expensive service (starting at 1500.00) and never thought I would take advantage of it, but there are some Hosted Exchange services that offer BES for a monthly fee (typically 9.99 USD per month). If you run a Microsoft Small Business Server and use email that way and have just a couple of users then the BES solution may have been an expensive option for you.

Then about a month ago, I got a post in one of my SBS tech lists about a free version of Blackberry Enterprise Server, called Blackberry Enterprise Server Express. This version comes with a single user CAL meaning one user can be connected and additional users (up to 15 can be added for about 100.00 USD). I did a Google search, found the page input my data (you have to supply a Blackberry Pin) and downloaded the software.

Today I finally got around to setting it up. Installation on my SBS 2003 Standard Server was fairly straight forward. The documentation guides you through the set up of a User account (requires SBS Cal) and applying the permissions that are required. Then you install the software. My first go really didn’t work right as I skipped the installation of SQL thinking it was on my server. While this server is an SBS 2003 R2 Premium server, I currently have it running as a Standard Server (No SQL and No ISA servers running). My first set up failed because I didn’t have SQL set up , so I installed SQL2005 Express (Another free download) and re installed the BB software (paying a little more attention to what I was doing). The install went fine and the databases set up fine. I went into BES Manager set up my user and then activated my Pearl using the Enterprise Activation on it. It synced everything up and I was in business. Now I can use my SBS server and Blackberry together for contacts, wireless sync and calendaring!

I did run into a few problems thought receiving emails afterwards, in fact my Exchange server had a problem receiving emails period. Turns out that an email archiving program that I was testing and uninstalled was still trying to archive my messages. I got that fixed and the mail started flowing properly again, when I ran into another problem. An MS patch removed the send as permissions on the BESADMIN account. Using an MS and Blackberry support article got that problem fixed and it looks like I am in business again.

One of the best things is that I can use both BIS and BES on my Pearl. So I still get email from the POP3 accounts that I set up but now I get email from my SBS 2003 server as well!

If you are interested in looking at this option please feel free to contact us and we will help set up your SBS server so that you can teach your BB new tricks.

Stephen

Currently there is a debate raging on the yahoo small business server mailing list about what is better for servers, backing up to tape or backing up to USB Hard Drives. Like all situations there is positives and negatives to both sides.

Our views
We have been using both types of backups for our clients but lately have been making the move to USB Hard Drive most often. Lower end tape drives (Travan) have not kept up to the ever expanding size of hard drives and I have found can sometimes be unreliable. Higher end tap drives with the proper capacity are expensive and the media is very expensive (Drives cost between 1000 to 5000 dollars CAN, and media is 100.00 – 200.00 CAN per tape). The largest two advantages of a tape system however is that the media is portable and easy to store offsite and you can add additional tapes to archive data over a longer period of time.

USB Hard Drives on the other hand are very inexpensive and often you can get 4 or 5 300 GB drives in enclosures for the cost of 1 lower end tape drive. There are a couple of problems that can occur with USB hard drives. The drives are more fragile than tape media. Dropping the enclosure can result in significant damage that renders the backups on it useless. The drives are bulkier than tape media. As well if a part of a backup set get’s corrupted due to bad media, the whole backup set may be useless, whereas with a tape the corrupted part of the media could still be skipped and the rest of the backup files restored. The biggest advantages are that they are fast (USB 2), they can hold much more data than a tape and they are inexpensive!

What have we been doing for our clients? Currently for Small business we are recommending a minimum of 2 USB Hard Drives in a rotation at minimum. Ideally 3 or 4 would be better. 1 Drive backs up 1 week and is rotated out and stored off site, and then the other drive is substitued. With a 3 or 4 drive system one drive could be used for archiving monthly backups. In addition with the cost of external hard drives dropping on a regular basis a new drive could be added every 5 to 6 months to store and archive backups.

Off site storage and archiving is very important. Many things can happen to a physical location (Fires, Theft, Flooding) and if there is no backup taken off site, important company data could be lost. For companies that are publicly traded and operating in the US, Sarbannes Oxley regulations force them to maintain archives of 7 years of all their data and email. Think to yourself. What would happen to my business if all of our data was wiped out today? A well planned, maintained and tested disaster recovery plan is well worth any cost in implementing!

We would be happy to discuss backup solutions with any of our exisiting clients or new clients. Soon we will be contacting everyone for a review of their existing disaster recover plans and where shortfalls may lie.

To the same affect most home users should also implement some sort of backup system. Often we work on PCs where there is a failure of either physical components or software issues where we attempt (and are usually successful) at recovering data, however this can become very expensive and time consuming.

There is an old IT expression that states “you are only as good as your last backup!” So true!

Stephen