Archive for July, 2008»
BES 4.1 SP6 Released
A huge amount of people have been hanging out for SP6, as it (finally) adds HTML support for your corporate mail.
My biggest concern with this is the impact to the Exchange organisation. For smaller companies with relatively small Exchange environments, this would be a huge value add with a performance hit that may not even be noticed. However, for larger companies this may cause issues.
When the handsets request "More" of the email, the BES needs to go back into the mailbox of the user to retrieve the full email. It needs to do this to ensure that the all of the <html> tags are present – otherwise, the email would look extremely messy with broken tags all over the place.
RIM know about the issue, and in the BES 4.1.6 Release Notes mentions the following:
For more information about the impact of supporting HTML and rich-content email messages on system resources, visit www.blackberry.com/go/serverdocs to see the Impact of supporting HTML and rich-content email messages document.
Unfortunately this document does not seem to be published at the moment – will keep you updated as to when it shows up.
Some of you may have noticed an MSN icon appear on your BlackBerry devices over the past week or so. Unfortunately, many users are reporting that when they try and download it, they get quite an unhelpful error message of
“Sorry, your device does not meet the system requirements that are needed to support Windows Live Messenger”
Luckily for us, we have access to the Blackberry provisioning system that one of our telcos use, so all we needed to do is place an extra service on the account, resend the service books, and we could successfully download, install, and use it.
You may want to call your service provider and ask if they can add the service on to your account, however they may want to charge you an additional fee.
We came across this on Friday morning. A vulnerability in BES has been discovered within the attachment service. Basically, a malicious PDF file sent to Blackberry user could cause the attachment service to execute arbitrary code – posing a huge security risk.
RIM have addressed the issue, and advised everyone running BES 4.1.3 to 4.1.5 to disable PDF’s from being processed in the attachment distiller.
More information can be found at the following BTSC article.