Ok, so patching any server is never just a walk in the park… but it’s not supposed to be the sort of thing which has to be attempted more than once.  Each failed attempt makes “higher ups” more and more wary of the competency of the IT staff.  So what types of concerns are there with the BES patch process?Well it’s not so much the process… actually, it’s not the post-patch issues.  Once patching has occurred, the BES needs to make connection with each and every device to push out new service books and “re-scan” the users’ mailboxes.  While this process really isn’t all that complicated, the time it takes to re-connect with each device is significant.  This time is increased exponentially when there’s a hefty amount of users.

Let’s just say an organization has about 2000 users on a single BES which they’d like to patch to say 4.1.6 or 5.0.  As it stands, post-patching connectivity would probably take in the neighborhood of about a day or two.  What self-respecting business has that much time to have users without connectivity?  So as a word of advice… When implimenting a new BES environment, go with the highest possible version to delay having to patch.

Incident for BlackBerry PIN to PIN service for subscribers of “The Americas

Network”

Impact: BlackBerry subscribers may experience delays in receiving PIN

messages and may receive an “x” when sending PIN messages.

Incident Window Start Date and Time: 23 July 2009 14:46:00 (EDT).

Duration: Ongoing

Seems like BlackBerry’s PIN messaging went down for a short while last night.  This would affect all those users wishing to send super-secrect messages…  Sorry guys, but it looks like you’ll have to learn how to use good ol email to communicate.  RIM still seems to be ironing out some kinks with their Network Operations.  Several system wide outages over the past few months could mean nothing or everything depending on how your organization uses their services.  It can be easy to get lured into the ease of deployment, the all-in-one solution, the ease of troubleshooting ect… But when you throw an outage here, an outage there… it quickly becomes an IT nightmare.  One unexpected outage can easily become 50-100 phone calls and emails.  As for other enterprise class wireless messaging solutions, I have yet to see the same sort of security issues.