[wunderbar]

Ok, I have kind of a stupid situation that I want to see if there's anything I can do about.

We recently hired a new employee, who has a BlackBerry from a previous job. The user is not exactly technical, and what my best guess is that they were on a BES before. The employee took over the contract on that blackberry, so it is his now. I think he either plans to sell it or give it to someone in his family. Almost inexplicably, the company he was working for before did not wipe his device, and the user wishes to move the contacts off of that blackberry over to our system, as he was given a company issued device from us.

Now, We've tried a couple of things. I tried creating a backup using desktop manager, then restoring that backup to the new device, but because the contact list was synchronized wirelessly with his previous job, the backup won't let me restore it to a different device. He tried using the data transfer wizard in the Desktop manager, but that didn't work as it broke his wireless contact sync, and I'm probably going to have to wipe our new device and do a new EA to get it to work again.

This user has 850 contacts on that device, and I really don't want to tell him there is no way to get them off his device, aside from manually transferring them, but I'm out of ideas.

Any thoughts?

[knottyrope]

Sounds like previous company thought about keeping them on the device with no way of getting them off of it.

[freakinvibe]

Well, what he should have done, to export the contacts from Outlook and then import it into the new Outlook of his new employer.

What I would try now is to disable wireless contact sync on the old device, make a backup of the contacts via DM, restore the contacts to the new device and enable wireless contact sync on the new device.

[wunderbar]

yea, I know what he should have done, and he's getting in touch with his previous company to see if he can get that data. He left on good terms, and is friendly with his prior manager, so he's hopeful.

I will try that suggestion, and see what happens.

[dev]

Why don't you simply turn-off wireless sync on the device. Go to the Options icon on the home screen. Depending on the type of device go to Advanced Options- Enterprise Activations. Once you're within that view, hold down the ALT key and type the letters "CNFG" without the quotes. The view would change and you should see the "Wireless Synchronization" is set to "yes". Change it to "no" and save it.
Then do the same in the Contacts view - change its wireless sync to "no".
Now do a backup of the data on the device. Once done, do a security wipe of the device.
Some newer devices or those with the double letters on the keys (Pearl) you would need to double type to get the correct letters.

After the above has been done and the device has rebooted after the wipe, chnage the date & time accordingly and turn the wireless radio on. At this stage restore the address book entries from the backup file using the Desktop Manager BEFORE doing an Enterprise Activation on your BES server.