Alex Scoble's IT Notes - An Information Technology Blog

An ITManager original post: Using ICE with BES

Perhaps you've seen the emails that went around after the London bombings regarding using an In Case of Emergency (ICE) contact on your cell phone.

Here's a good post on the subject of ICE numbers from Ferris research.

But what about if you administer an organization running Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES)? Most of us who do lock down all Blackberries connected to the server by default. In other words, the device locks and requires a password to be entered after a certain amount of time.

So most likely, if you are in a disaster and an emergency worker finds your Blackberry, it will be locked up. What then?

Go to Options and Owner Info and add the ICE number there so it appears on your locked page.

For instance, all of our BBs show:

ICE: (xxx) xxx-xxxx and (xxx) xxx-xxxx [where the first number is emergency contact and second is main work number]

Used by Alex Scoble

If found please return to:
[TZ's mailing address]

That way if you are in an accident or disaster, emergency crews can quickly notify the proper people of this fact and also get as much info about your medical history as possible, most importantly medications you are on and what you are allergic to.

Blackberry Tips Post on Computerworld Blog

I've just posted some tips with links that Blackberry users and IT administrators might find useful.

You can go here to see the post.

How Not To Handle A Tech Support Call - T-Mobile GPRS Outage In San Diego On Monday May 16th

Last week I got a call from one of our attorneys that was on a business trip in San Diego. She couldn't get emails on her Blackberry 7730. Quickly we ascertained that her phone was only getting GSM (voice) service and tried to get GPRS signal by restarting the BB by removing and reinserting the battery.

We couldn't get it to properly connect so I had her call T-Mobile support. Oy, what a mistake that was. They quickly said that the network was working properly, there were no reported outages and that it must be a system administration problem. The kicker is that they actually expected her to provide the SRP ID for our BES server! Like a user out in the field will know what that is much less know what it is.

Later on the user saw on T-Mobile's website that there was an outage in the area, plus she ran into a bunch of other T-Mobile customers in the area that were having the same problem. Eventually it started working again.

There's a lesson in this incident for anyone that does tech support. ALWAYS, and I do mean ALWAYS, assume that the problem reported is with your systems until you can verify to a high degree of certainty that the problem is not with your systems.

Let's take that T-Mobile call for example, they should have assumed that the problem was with their equipment and bent over backwards to prove otherwise instead of making the user prove where the problem was.

An example of how I deal with tech support issues would be when I get a call from a user that they aren't receiving email from a specific external sender and the messages aren't stuck in their spam filter. I can quickly find out that our systems are generally up by sending test messages from the several email accounts that I have. However, even if I receive these emails quickly, I still check logs and with other users to see that other traffic is still flowing into our mail server.

I also telnet into the sender's email server to see that it's working. Basically, I remove any doubt that our server is having problems. If possible, I even try to call the IT person that supports the sender to see if we can figure out what's going on.

The last thing I want is for one of my users, particularly an attorney to be dissatisfied with my service.

You'd kind of expect the same for an organization like T-Mobile wouldn't you? What's ironic is that T-Mobile has typically rated at or near the top of the national cellular providers in terms of service.

Anyhow, if you want to be a high-quality support person that is admired by customers and colleagues alike, then do your best to first make sure that any given problem is not in your realm. Maybe you think that it doesn't matter what you do because you work in a support call center for a company or companies that service thousands of customers, but it does matter.

You will only have a job as long as your company has customers and your actions can  quickly lose business for your company, because you never know if you are supporting someone very influential in the purchasing process for a large organization. By the way, I'm influential in that process where I work, but we are far from large, but keep getting groups of 20 people to switch to your competitor and see how long you have a job.

Oh, and I'm not saying that I will suggest that we switch from T-Mobile when our contract is up because of this, since as far as I know the support records for all the major cell providers isn't very good at all, but it will certainly be on my mind as we decide to renew or go with someone else.

When Support Techs Pass The Buck

I've been writing about the problems we've been having with the quad-band phones. So the last thing I was told by a RIM tech was that the phone wasn't designed to work unless signal strength is at least -80db. Well, I've found this to be pure bullshit, pardon my francais.

First off, the quad-band phones from T-Mobile don't work around my building even when signal strength is as high as -75db. Second off, when I'm in other areas, the phone is able to find the proper network with lower than -80db signal strength.

What does this mean? Either there's a design flaw in the phone, or there's a problem with the way that T-Mobile handles their networks. Now I've heard that T-Mobile locks their quad-band phones so that they can't connect to the 850mhz band which Cingular uses, but I'm not sure if that's true. If it is true, it would explain my issues as there is a Cingular tower in this area that delivers higher signal strength to certain parts of the building. Suppose that the quad band phone sees this network and tries to talk to it, instead of the lower strength T-Mobile network, but can't because T-Mobile has the phone set up so it can't communicate at this band. Suppose that the phone gets confused and does not try to connect to the other band tower because it's algorithm is such that it will always connect to the tower with -80db or higher strength.

Either way, the building isn't the issue as my 7730s work and the 7290 gets same signal strength ONCE it has connected to the network. The towers are probably working to spec otherwise I'm sure a lot more people would be complaining about this issue in my area, particularly as quad-band phones get used more and more. So it's either a design flaw made by RIM or a problem with the way that T-Mobile sets up the phones. Either way, it's something that should be fixable and should certainly be fixed.

We are the customer. We want the features that the 7290 has to offer. In fact we need the memory that it has. T-Mobile and RIM should bend to make it work for us, especially as we are pouring money into their coffers every month.

Now, I'm sure some people will say, good luck, companies don't care about business as small as yours, well, I say that they better. Small businesses are the main driving force in today's economy. They employ more people and generate more wealth than large companies. Plus, our needs are not as diverse or as large as a large company, so if someone like T-Mobile or RIM can't satisfy the needs of the small business, how can they possibly hope to satisfy the needs of a large business which has much more complicated requirements?

At any rate, we are paying for the phone and the service and that entitles us to have a working phone and working service, regardless of how big or small we are.

So RIM and T-Mobile fix the !@#$ing phone!

RIM Quadband Blackberries Not Good for "Low" Coverage Areas

Well, if you are in a marginal or low coverage area for your GPRS carrier like T-Mobile, I highly suggest that you not get one of the newer quad-band phones. In other words, if you only get 2 bars of signal on your 7730 in your office or home, don't upgrade to the 7100 or the 7290. They both have the same issues of needing higher signal strength than the 7730 in order to properly find the network.

By the way, I should mention that I'm totally not happy with either T-Mobile's or RIM's support on this issue. On T-Mobile's end, it's clearly a coverage issue and should be remedied by increasing tower signal strength or whatever. On RIM's end, it's clearly a matter of phone design since the 7730 and the 6230s work fine in this building or in other marginal coverage areas.

Anyhow, guess I have to do another BB replacement. These quad band Blackberries have been a total pain in the ass. They have the features that people want/need (more memory and Bluetooth) but don't work properly in the building. What sucks even more is that if/when RIM comes out with an updated 7730, I'm sure that it too will be quad band and have the same issues.

And no, moving is not an option. Besides, there's no guarantee that we won't have the same problem in a different location. It's not like our particular corner of Palo Alto is the only place in the country/world with this problem.

So if you want a Blackberry with the best reach possible, don't get a quad band model. You might have better experience with a Cingular model since they are on a different band, but the phones will still have the same higher signal requirement vs the 77xxs.

Biggest Complaint Of Blackberries So Far - Interface Lock Up

For most of the attorneys, the Blackberries are pretty good devices for keeping caught up with emails. There are a few attorneys, however, who really require a robust platform for emails as well as Personal Information Management (PIM) and phone use.

The Blackberry is usable as a phone, but I think that a lot of the attorneys feel that the 7730 is a little big to hold as a phone and the lack of Bluetooth limits their headphone choices.

The Blackberry's biggest weakness, however, especially in OS 4.0 seems to be in the PIM arena and specifically contacts. Actually, OS 4 presents a few problems even for users who have no contacts. The fact is that OS 4 takes up a lot more headroom than OS 3.7 did. Blackberries run slower on OS 4 and often freeze up with the hourglass while it's processing something or other. This is kind of annoying when you are typing a password and you get the hourglass and have no idea what characters of your password were grabbed properly.

It is, however, a major annoyance when you have a good sized address book (lets say over 1000 contacts). When you have that many contacts, the Blackberry often locks up for VERY LONG periods of time while it does whatever operations it does to sort through the contacts, especially if you have content protection turned on.

Whereas a Palm, or Palm Treo chugs through contacts very quickly thanks to it's much faster processor.

Ahh, the things I wish I knew before we got all set up with Blackberries...Would have been nice to know that the Treo processor is 10 (TEN!) times faster than the Blackberry's.

Anyhow, if anyone from Research in Motion (RIM) is listening...it would be REALLY REALLY helpful, if you either came out with a much faster Blackberry very soon, or changed the OS so that it would always reserve some processing power for the user interface.

It SERIOUSLY degrades the user experience when you have to wait and wait for the @#&$ing thing to finish doing whatever it is that it's doing.

Whats Up With the &*#! Quad Band Blackberries?

Like I reported last week, we got one of the new Blackberry 7290s in from T-Mobile. Well, just like the 7100s that we got before it, which were also quad-band, the damn thing won't find the T-Mobile network in our building.

I don't know what is up with the T-Mobile quad band phones, but they seem to have reception issues.

What I don't understand is that one of our Canon techs had a 7100T from T-Mobile and it worked just fine in our building. It's enough to drive this IT person batty!

*Update* OK, I just walked a bit down the street and manually selected the proper network. Looks like for some reason the automatic network scanning procedure wasn't working. When I did manual scan in good signal area got two T-mobile networks.

So now the 7290 works fine in our building. Go figure. Still don't know what it is about the quad-band T-Mobile BBs that make them not work correctly in our building.

New Blackberry Same As The Old

We got the BB 7290 in today. Even with the extra memory, it is slow, slow, slow. RIM needs to do a completely new redesign because the current models are just about worthless as a PIM for someone who has a lot of contacts.

I mean, the whole point of these devices is to be the end-all be-all device for a user. If it chokes on 6000 contacts, what's the point?

I think that processor speed is the main area where the BBs fall short compared to the Treos.

I just wish that Palm would get off their butts and deploy Treos with the Blackberry Enterprise connector already.

Blackberry 7290 Now Available from T-Mobile

I should have mentioned this when I found out from our sales rep last week, but T-Mobile is now selling the Blackberry 7290.

This is a newer version of the old 7230 with Bluetooth built in, quad-band support (850mhz, 900mhz, 1800mhz and 1900mhz) and 32MB of memory (twice what the old version or the 7730 has).

We just ordered one so I'll blog my experiences with it.

By the way, their website still lists it as coming soon, so I'm not sure if they are only offering it to corporate customers at the moment or what. I'll post any news I get when I get it.

Caution Advised With OS 4.0 for Blackberries

So T-Mobile released OS 4.0 for the BB7730 and BB7230 about a week ago. I installed it on my BB right away and it works fine for me, although unlocking it is a little slower than before.

Has a lot of great features that are new, such as over the air synching of all data, much greater font choices, password keeper availability, over the air enterprise activation and so on.

Problem is, it also takes up about .5 to 1mb more of memory on the BB. So if you have someone with a 7730 that is already near to capacity with OS 3.7, I would suggest that you be very careful when upgrading to OS 4.0. Do not do a straight export/import of their data, but rather move only the data that the user needs. Alternatively, you can wait until the 7290s are available sometime within the next month, as that unit supposedly has 32mb of memory instead of 16mb for the 7730.

7290s and the similar 7250s are already available from some other carriers.

I'm hoping that RIM will do an update soon for the 7730 to include quad-band, bluetooth, faster CPU and more memory.

By the way, for those looking for differences between Blackberries and Treos, apparently the Treo processors are something on the order of 10 times faster. This can make a big difference for those of you out there with large contact lists (more than 1000).