Costas Tsaklas’ Blog

I recently installed BES Express on two SBS 2003 R2 servers and I found myself looking through different documents in order to make sure that I followed the instructions properly. For that reason I decided to post the steps I followed just in case I need to refer to them again in the future.

First I requested the software from RIM at http://na.blackberry.com/eng/services/server/offers/professional_express.jsp

An email arrived with instructions on how to download and install the software. A couple of hours later I received another email with the keys I would be needing during installation which also provide me for one, free, user license. After that I spend sometime reading the different knowledge base articles about the installation process, among them one that described how to install the BES server on SBS 2003

The first task according to that document was to create a new domain user and give the account the permissions described in another document that can be found here.

Second task was to download and install a new, named instance of MSDE. I went to Microsoft’s web site and I downloaded the engine ( here ). From the different files listed for download at that location the one I needed was the SQL2000.MSDE-KB884525-SP4-x86.EXE. I run the executable and the the files were extracted on the hard drive.

After that I followed the instructions found on another RIM document to install the ‘BlackBerry‘ named MSDE instance.

The time had come to install BES Express. Before that I had to configure ISA to allow traffic on ports 3101 and 3500. I started by creating a user defined protocol with primary connections Outbound at ports 3101 and 3500 and secondary, inbound connections on the same ports. I finished by creating an Access Rule that used the protocol I had just created From the localhost computer to External.

I logged on the server using the user account that had created earlier, made sure that the ‘BlackBerry‘ MSDE instance was running (Services console) and run the BES executable. The process was pretty much straight forward and very easy following the interactive, step-by-step guide, that RIM provided. When it finished (requires one reboot half way through the process), I logged in SBS using again the BES user account and added the User Account to the BES Server

As a precaution I followed the instructions that I found here to add dependencies between the BlackBerry MSDE instance and some of the BES Services.

After the installation completed I saw the ‘Java Update’ icon on the task bar. I read that BES requires the Java version that it installs, and for that reason I canceled the update. A thing that I observed is that one of the servers spent more time applying “Computer Settings” during reboot than usual. I’m not sure if that is related to BES or not but I plan to follow up if I come to some concrete conclusion.