Wireless Contacts in 4.0
 

There doesn't appear to be a way to pick which Contacts folders get synchronized over wireless synch. It appears to synch the 'Contacts' folder and everything underneath it.

This is dissapointing because I use to be able to synch a Contacts folder in our public folders and pick/choose which of my Contacts folders get synched.

That is correct and I thought very bad design as well. I brought this up during my beta testing with RIM and I was phase 1. They didn't seem to think it was a big deal. I don't remember what it was but they did give me a reg hack that will stop it from synching the folders under contacts and only synch the contacts folder. That may help a bit but you would have to call RIM for the reg hack or if someone on hear nows it and can post it.

I agree this is a pain. But thankfully just moving the folder(s) underneath the main contacts (or any PIM item for that matter) to eithe the mailbox level or a another location will cause the items to be removed wirelessly. I've had quite a few users who I worked with remotely that had a Contacts Backup folder. Once it was deleted or moved everything sync'd to only include the Main Contacts folder.

Can you post the registry key that changes this behavior?

TBESAdmin, I did figure out that rearranging my folders will allow me to work around the situation...but it does absolutely nothing for my public folders issue. My company has centralized contacts so know I have all the individual technicians having to regularly drag a *copy* of the public folders contacts to their personal contacts in order to get updates. We have public folder contacts so there is only one copy--this totally defeats the utility of that approach.

I consider this serious downgrade in functionality for us.

I'm with you 100%. I'm on all the boards looking for a workaround. We have the same setup with centralized contacts in the public folders, now nothing. I don't want to have users regularly copy the public folder into their contacts folder, consistency will be a mess.

At the very least, for now, I'm willing to accept something that regularly deletes then re-copies the public folder to the contacts folder. But, it has to be automatic giving the users more to do manually is suicide (for me).

Help!!

Steve

Does it not allow you to browse the public folders anymore in an exchange environment on 4.0?

You can only sync with public folders using the cable and desktop manager. This kind of defeats the purpose of OTA syncing.

I'm glad I'm forewarned as we're set to upgrade our BES server in the next week.

We have a "MasterBB" contact list in public folders we update so when a users synch's they get any new users without us having to do any manual updates. Also some of our users have hundreds of contacts they don't want to clog their BB's with so we gave them a local "bbcontacts" contact list as well.

BB support tells me it's in the architecture, they didn't seem pleased when I referred to it as a design flaw - but that's how it looks to me. If anyone knows of a way to get this to work, please let us know...

yeah... When I talk to them about they get a weird tone in their voice. Kind of like their tired of hearing about it yet they don't want fix it or acknowledge it as a problem.

Synching Public Contacts and Personal Contacts
 

So did anyone come to any solution about how to have the personal and public contacts sync?

It does do the OTA sync with subcontact lists within the main contacts folder. We've been copying our directory from the public folder to the contacts folder manually. Make sure you copy the contact list not the individual contacts. This keeps it organized so if you want to update it you can just recopy the public list on to of the old one.

I was not aware that blackberry 4.0 did not have public folder wireless reconciliation until I just attempted it a few minutes ago. This was a key point in selling it to a client. Our communcations partner who provided the blackberry environment for this client also stipulated that public folder wireless was functional! Great huh?

Damon

Synchronizing Personal and Public Contacts
 

Did anyone have a solution for this? I have looked all over the internet for something that will auto sync the contacts in the 2 folders but have found nothing, has anyone gotten any closer to a solution?

Thanks!

I have been playing with an Exchange Event Sink, but I guess my programming skills are not sufficient to bring this to a succesful end.

I created the event sink on the public folder, and with every new and modified item I copy the item to the private folder(s). (Actually I copy them to a subfolder of the regular contacts folder). And I try to delete the item from the private folder(s) when a delete is occuring on the public folder.

So far so good. However, I lose the link with the item in the private folder if some of the name properties change in the public folder. And that is just the first of probably many problems I will encounter without a proper solution.

I haven't even started on a bi-direction syncronisation.

Anyone interested can have the source code I have created sofar. Perhaps some VB programmers can convert this to something we could all use?

Regards, Stefan.

Source code
 

I'm interested in the code

Peter

Not a great work around, but you could add them to your global address book in Exchange. Then when composing a message for example, use the Lookup function to look up the information against the global address book.

I have send the script to the email address found in your profile.

sddroog; I'm also interested in the code. I was just doing some research before I started creating my own simple mono-directional event sink.
I'd be happy to share any successes or failures with all.

The following is the "Reg Hack" that was referred to by "UDontKnowJack" as he mentioned, "that will stop it from synching the folders under contacts and only synch the contacts folder." See below:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Research In Motion\BlackBerry Enterprise Server\Agents
Name: DisableSyncingSubFolders

Description: Force MailBox Agents to only synch root PIM folders for PIM agents

Type: REG_DWORD

Data: 0x1

This entry does not exist by default

For PIM folders which contain subfolders (e.g. client creates a subfolder in their Memos folder) the agent can either attempt to synch the contents of the subfolder (0) or not (1)