I have recently just had the pleasure of setting up a new Exchange 2010 server along with the new Blackberry Enterprise Server 5. The installation seemed very similar to BES 4 installations but there were a few more screens of information to fill out.

The big change to note was that the new BES server configuration is all web based. Sort of like VMWare Server 2. At this point I still don’t like it because it only seems to be enabled from the local host so what is the point of having it web based anyway. I would like to see it working over a VPN on a remote computer but have not accomplished this yet. There are two authentication methods for this web based administration site called BlackBerry Administration Server (BAS). In the BAS configuration screen to can choose to use built-in BAS authentication or to use Active Directory authentication. At first I choose AD authentication but wasn’t able to get it working. I did some research on the issue and concluded that almost nobody got it working. To switch back to BAS authentication you have to fully uninstall and re-install BES.

The second issue I noticed was this error below. I haven’t been able to find anyone else having this problem but I was able to ignore the issue and everything seems to be working OK.

The last and biggest issue encountered was the fact that BES was not picking up Activation e-mails out of the user’s mailboxes. There didn’t seem to be any log entries in MAGT or any other log files. I finally found one post that mentioned turning off IP6 on the BES server and after restarting, those e-mails were being picked up and BlackBerries were activating.

Instruction for turning off IPv6 in Windows Server 2008 can be found here.