ZCS BES connector after one week

[sdemeyer]

I thought I'd share my experiences with BES connector after one week of use.

ZCS BES connector couldn't have been made available at a better time. My users were in dire need for mobile access and I was within a day of having to choose between WM or Blackberry with a third party. My users hated WM with Active Sync so we were going to use the ZCS Mobile Web client. I was leery of using a 3rd party for BB so our BB phones were going to be shelved. ZCS Mobile Client is good but still lacks necessary functionality such as access to GAL.

My installation of ZCS BES connector was a little troublesome. Mostly because I am required to only use port 80 for our remote web mail and ZCS BES connector requires port 443. I could not seem to get Zimbra to run entirely on both 443 and 80 so I had to trick ZCS BES by installing Apache on our Zimbra server and proxying 443 traffic to port 80. This seems to work well and was not that difficult to steup.

I have 15 users currently using BES. Over the last week everything has worked perfectly. OTA enterprise activation worked perfect, e-mail is flowing fine, have not had any issues with calendar or address book. My users are very happy.

A big THANK YOU to the Zimbra developers is in order! You guys saved my life, not to mention a ton of taxpayers $$!

Scott