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BES Express is frankly shocking, I thought RIM may have improved after the travisty that was BPS but I think that they are even worse. Does RIM employ only cyfilidic howler monkeys as programers or must they all undergo a full labotomy to get their jobs. First off registering to get BES Express in New Zealand is impossible, I'm not exagerating, it actually is. Initially attempting to register with the companies address resulted in being told that the road did not exist. It has only been there for the last 60 years so I guess its a bit recent for them. Issue two was encountered when using a road that was accepted (100+ years old) and this is where the imposibility comes in. When you click submit it wipes the city field then returns an error that you must include a city. Firefox, Chrome, IE, it made no difference, neither did attempting different cities. Solution: register using an Australian address copied off their contact page, they at least know that their own address exists. Issue two, not really a fault but rather an annoyance is their rubbish slow servers, 100k a second turns a 560MB download into a long wait. Now to the install and after installing the many prerequsites manually and doing loads of configuration manually (have they heard of an installer wizard?) you finally get to the install. Suprisingly it installed without error, I'm not saying that there were not problems or that it worked but it did not make any error messages. After the install finished I got a lovely page telling me that I now just needed to go to this web page to continue configuring it. Problem, the webpage does not work, no helpful error, nothing, just a timeout. Re-reading through the common issues it turns out that BES in its infinite incompetence does not handle multiple network cards well. It is supposed to be put on a server and it has problems with multiple NICs, who are these people. So solution found, push the right interface up to the top of the bindings list in networking advanced properties and it should work... Should, as it fails in the exact same way. More internet searching and attempts to find solutions eventually reveil that BES fails when either of two Windows hotfixes are installed. This is a known issue with no fix timeline but thats fine the workaround is just to remove them. They are unimportant only patching kernel escilation issues, its not like you would want your server to be pretected from complete compromise anyway. Remove these two and restart the server, is the problem solved? No. Same issue. At this point I'm looking to the free support incident as the only way to even get this mad bit of overhyped java running and log into the support portal, go to make a support incident and the button is greyed out. Really, how do I raise an incident about not being able to raise an incident. It makes my head spin. Religated to the fact that I would have to make this steaming pile of filth run all by myself I continued the fight. Eventually comming to the realisation, after reading through 100 or so pages of error logs that BAS (the blackberry administration service) can't connect to the SQL server. The installer defaults to using dynamic ports and to strive for a problem free install I had left the defaults. My mistake, turns out that that does not work if there are any other instances of SQL on the box at all. First I needed to make sure the SQL Browser service was running then after configuring the SQL instance to use the default port on the all ips instance and removing the setting for dynamic it finally kicked into life. The above does not even include the need to manually setup firewall rules for it or the hunt for the right CDO with MAPI compnents to install. So after wasteing only five hours of my time it was installed, I have still to find out if it even works with the Blackberries. I just want to know how they get away with releasing such junk, the coding level would even make an educational software developer blush in embaresment. How have the developers not been hunted down and delt with by angry IT workers from their local area. The mind boggels and I can only look foward to the day when all of their Blackberries are replaced with something that uses Activesync, at this point I would even settle for iPhones. Has BES made anyone else criminally angry lately or is it just me?

The Problem: When installing the MUSAC Classic package or any updates the installer requires the presence of Adobe Acrobat Reader whether you have a better, more secure PDF viewer installed or not. After my request to have this issue sorted was flat out ignored by MUSAC I devised a fix by monitoring their impetuous installer with Process Monitor. I was then able to track down the criteria it used to determine if Acrobat was installed and replicate it in a couple of registry keys. The Fix: Save the following text in notepad as a "whatever.reg" file and merge it (run it) on the machine you will be doing the upgrade from: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{B801CA65-A1FC-11D0-85AD-444553540000}] @="Adobe Acrobat Document" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{B801CA65-A1FC-11D0-85AD-444553540000}\LocalServer32] @=hex(2):25,00,77,00,69,00,6e,00,64,00,69,00,72,00,25,00,5c,00,6e,00,6f,00,74,\ 00,65,00,70,00,61,00,64,00,2e,00,65,00,78,00,65,00,00,00 The Explaination: This places a GUID in the registry that the installer looks for to find the path to the Acrobat Reader executable. I have replaced this path with a self expanding path of "%windir%\notepad.exe" which should point to a valid executable on almost any version of Windows. It does need to point to a valid executable as the installer does verify that it is there. The Rant: Checking for a specific bloated security nightmare of an application is plainly not a smart way to write an installer. It should look for an assosiation to the .pdf filetype if they insist on requireing a PDF viewer. I sincerly hope that they do see fit to resolve this problem in the future however given their complete lack of response to my original queries I doubt that they will.