I have built a new server on VMWare to accommodate the new Blackberry Enterprise Server Express 5.0.1 that was just recently released. I was quite ecstatic to hear RIM was giving this up for free. Since I had a 5 CAL license for Windows 2003 Small Business Server, I setup this on my VM, which also included Exchange Server 2003. Setup was easy, did all the updates to this ancient OS. Then setup the BESX on the same server. Since I only plan to host personal/SOHO domain, this is totally acceptable. Blackberry suggests I can have upto 75 users on this server. The server itself is pretty decent – Xeon, 4GB ECC Ram, Raid5.
Blackberry has this great video tutorial that shows how to set the BESX up in a jiffy.
you can view the video here
Going forward, I had redirected my domains email to the exchange server, this entailed me to purchase anti spam software as it was getting ridiculous with out it.
What I decided to do is activate POP3 Connector which comes with the SBS 2003 OS. The downside was that it only polls every 15 minimum. Boo! Doesnt that defeat having push email to the blackberry?
Well I found a reg edit hack that will accelerate the polling.
You can set the polling interval in the GUI if you view the properties of
the POP3 Connector Manager, and then click the “Scheduling” tab. To set the
polling interval so that polling occurs more frequently than every 15
minutes, you must configure the ScheduleAccelerator registry entry.
1. Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
“HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SmallBusinessServer\Network\POP3
Connector”
2. On the “Edit” menu, point to “New”, and then click “DWORD Value”.
3. Type “ScheduleAccelerator” (without the quotation marks) as the entry
name, and then press ENTER.
5. On the “Edit” menu, click “Modify”.
6. In the “Value data” box, click decimal, type the value that you want, and then click
“OK”. To determine the polling interval, the value that is configured on the
“Scheduling” tab in the GUI is divided by the value that you type for the
ScheduleAccelerator entry. For example, if a 15 minute interval is specified
in the GUI and you set the value of the ScheduleAccelerator entry to 3, the
connector will poll ever five minutes.
7. Quit Registry Editor