Monthly Archives: May 2013

Unknown's avatar Pete 8:08 am on May 14, 2013
Tags: BBLive, , BES10, , ,   

Could BlackBerry be turning the page?

BlackBerryLive

I was reading up on BlackBerry live news this morning and I stumbled upon this important tidbit. BlackBerry set sales records in the UK and in Canada when it launched. Now assuming this is true, this is really good news for RIM.  As I wrote earlier, RIM is definitely hurting in the marketplace right now, and any good news helps.  This time last year at BlackBerry world, I met with some very high profile customers who were talking about plans to move off of BlackBerry and BES.  In the past few months, I’ve heard plans of implementing BES 10 ( which is the sudo-BES for BlackBerry 10 devices) along with their stand alone MDM solution

Could BlackBerry be part of MDM solutions going forward, we will see…

Unknown's avatar Pete 5:44 am on May 14, 2013
Tags: month and a half, technical challenges, technical sessions   

My first WES…..

WES

I remember the first time I went to WES, now BlackBerry live ( also called BlackBerry world, and BlackBerry user conference).  I met so many people that I had met through different online avenues.  It was a magical place, and at the time BlackBerry were the kings of the hill.  The late night parties, the technical sessions, meeting RIM developers and so much more.  It was  very worth every penny that my company spent on it.  This year, I had a dilemma, with BlackBerry’s recent dealing’s, and no real announcements to speak of, I had to decide on if it would be worth it.  I’m in the middle of working on a pretty large deployment for a new customer over in London.  So I passed on BlackBerry live.  So I sit here, on the side lines, waiting like everyone else to see what comes next.  For the past 7 years, I’ve been involved with RIM, both as a user and a BlackBerry engineer.  I’ve done hundreds of BES upgrades, spoken to RIM about several technical challenges and just met some amazing people along the way.  If I had to sum up all the feelings I’ve had for RIM over the last few years I would just say this.  The good times didn’t have to stop, but you chose to let them.  You did not innovate.

I was in attendance last year at BlackBerry world, and I listened to the speeches, the promises and the very weak demo of BB10. (BTW that was a video, if it wasn’t a video then why wouldn’t he show us any of the features that we were promised)I found myself getting very mad listening to Hein’s speak.  I’m sick of demo’s, I’m sick of promising my customers to wait.  I want something now.  Then about 6 months later, I finally got my hands on one.  I’ve been using a Z10 for about a month and a half now, as my only device. Besides the lack of applications, I will say that I am very impressed.  I love the typing, I love BlackBerry hub, and the internet experience is light years above the competition.  My only question is, why did this take 3 years to come out.  I still feel like BlackBerry missed the boat…

Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales to End Users by Vendor in 2012 (Thousands of Units)

Company

2012

Units

2012 Market Share (%)

2011

Units

2011 Market Share (%)
Samsung

384,631.2

22.0

315,052.2

17.7
Nokia

333,938.0

19.1

422,478.3

23.8
Apple

130,133.2

7.5

89,263.2

5.0
ZTE

67,344.4

3.9

56,881.8

3.2
LG Electronics

58,015.9

3.3

86,370.9

4.9
Huawei Technologies

47,288.3

2.7

40,663.4

2.3
TCL Communication

37,176.6

2.1

34,037.5

1.9
Research In Motion

34,210.3

2.0

51,541.9

2.9
Motorola

33,916.3

1.9

40,269.1

2.3
HTC

32,121.8

1.8

43,266.9

2.4
Others

587399.6

33.6

595886.9

33.6
Total

1,746,175.6

100.0

1,775,712.0

100.0

I guess the real reason I’m writing this, is I really hope I won’t have to say one day “I missed the last BlackBerry conference”

Unknown's avatar Pete 8:18 pm on May 7, 2013  

FSMO Roles

Flexible single master operation or operations master

Strange, I work regularly with these roles, but after being asked the other day what they stood for, I had no idea.

Lets start by taking a look at what FSMO roles you have, install the Support Tools from the \Support\Tools folder on your product CD and type netdom query fsmo at a command prompt and you should get something like this.

ss1dos

By Default, all the FSMO roles will be installed on the first domain controller in your forest.  When you install the first DC of any other domain in your forest, that DC will hold all three domain FSMO roles (PDC Emulator, RID Master, and Infrastructure Master).

1. Forest Roles

  • Schema Master – As name suggests, the changes that are made while creation of any object in AD or changes in attributes will be made by single domain controller and then it will be replicated to another domain controllers that are present in your environment. There is no corruption of AD schema if all the domain controllers try to make changes. This is one of the very important roles in FSMO roles infrastructure.
  • Domain Naming Master – This role is not used very often, only when you add/remove any domain controllers. This role ensures that there is a unique name of domain controllers in environment.

2. Domain Roles

  • Infrastructure Master – This role checks domain for changes to any objects. If any changes are found then it will replicate to another domain controller.
  • RID Master – This role is responsible for making sure each security principle has a different identifier.
  • PDC emulator – This role is responsible for Account policies such as client password changes and time synchronization in the domain
Unknown's avatar Pete 3:39 pm on May 6, 2013
Tags: , AD, Directory services, LDAP, Mailbox servers, Remote Powershell   

Why you should never change the name of your mailbox server, ever.

I recently had the pleasure of dealing with a customer who renamed their Exchange mailbox servers, and the pains that went along with it.  The obvious thing here is, you should never be renaming your Exchange mailbox servers, and I will attempt to explain why.  The first thing to realize is that Active Directory is liberally populated with references to an Exchange server name.  These are everywhere in Active Directory, so when you make this change, there is a good chance (100% certainty) that AD will not populate these changes to all the users.  So why is this a big deal?  Those settings in AD are the configurations that we use every single day.  When you make a change to the object that active directory references, AD has no way knowing the new name of the object.  This can cause you HUGE problems going forward with things like Remote-Powershell, Directory services, Calender delegates and many other LDAP objects.