Last month I have talked about the Kerio Connect bringing BES support with 7.1 version. After some testing and creating a huge thread of complaints in Kerio Forums, I have some updates.

1. Amazingly, if you follow this exact order, it works fine:

a. Install AD
b. Install Kerio
c. Install Kerio Blackberry Connect
d. Install BES 5

I verified this with a local install. What perplexes me is the fact that if you reverse a and b, it will not work. KBC gives an error during MAPI account creation.

For those interested, you can see the thread at: http://forums.kerio.com/index.php?t=msg&th=17803&

So far, no one can explain why AD has to be installed first. On many existing installs of Kerio, companies don’t have the AD installed. I guess, their only solution will be using a separate server. You can do steps a, c and d on a separate server, if you have an existing server with Kerio running. The beauty is it even doesn’t have to be in your local network. You can have two servers in two separate locations. Of course it is not an ideal case, but it

I have been very excited to see latest Kerio Mail Server (KMS) brings Blackberry Enterprise Server connectivity. It uses Kerio Blackberry Connector (KBC) to create a MAPI connection to make BES think it is connecting to an Exchange server.

For testing, I tried to create a single server install, but this didn’t work. Here is the dilemma. KMS and KBC installs fine to a single server. But when I go ahead with BES Express install, during the Blackberry Administration Service install, it tries to query Active Directory and Kerio’s own LDAP will not handle this.

So as a workaround, I tried to install KMS first, run dcpromo to setup Active Directory. I had to move Kerio’s LDAP server to different ports, as it was running at ports 389 and 636 used by AD. So far so good. However, this time, KBC is not aware of port change and for some reason during its setup it queries LDAP (even though the account it was using was using internal DB). Of course the query fails, as it hits AD.

So, for testing I’ll have to create to servers, one running AD and possibly KBC and BESX and one running KMS. I wish Kerio would make KBC aware of which LDAP ports KMS is running at. One can only dream

I am testing a pure SIP client for Blackberry and I am excited. This is the first time I have seen a SIP client for Blackberry. The UI is not the best, but initial experiments show it has lots of promises. I tested it with a FreeSwitch server and worked well. Now time to test it with Asterisk

This news brings back so many memories. As a kid I grew up playing games on my trusty Commodore 64 and one of my favorite software developers was Elite. It is good to see they are celebrating their 25th anniversary and they have released Paperboy for Blackberry devices. You can take a look at the game at AppWorld. It looks very cool and nostalgic. I might pick it up for the sheer nostalgia factor. It is priced decently at

My sources just informed me that the long awaited Blackberry Application Suite no longer exists in RIM’s roadmap.

This is a sad news for Windows Mobile community. I have used one of the early releases of the Blackberry Application Suite and its emulation was great. Plus, unlike Blackberry Connect, it did support PIN-to-PIN messaging, as well as Blackberry Maps. Too bad, it will not see the light of the day.

It makes me wonder, if there are further updates coming along Blackberry Connect. It has been over 6 months a new release is done.