EHLO Me!

I must admit – I do not like BlackBerry. Probably this is the soul’s cry of a tech guy who repeatedly encounters different sort of issues with this technology.
As the Exchange pro I would speak about BES exclusively leaving behind BIS.
In the particular post I would like to discuss one of the possible activation failures that can well be treated on user’s side rather than on the server’s (what a rare occurrence this is!)
Okay, here’s the plot: Enterprise activation starts and never completes. The activation process may get stuck somewhere in middle of the road, say, 30% or 50% or 80% or whatever without any reasonable explanation why it gets stuck.

If you’re BES admin then this is easier for you and you may check the logs trying to find something like this:

Event Type: Warning Event Source: BlackBerry Messaging Agent BES SERVER Agent 3 Event Category: None Event ID: 20530 Date: 9/8/2010 Time: 9:05:22 AM User: N/A Computer: COMPUTER Description: {unlucky_user@badluck.com} ConstructPIMFolder – Failed to open the memo folder for user (0×80040107)

There is a good article providing the problem description.

So I followed the article and checked PR_IPM_CONTACT_FOLDER_ ENTRYID and PR_IPM_NOTE_FOLDER_ ENTRYID both in Root Container and in Top of Information Store with MFCMapi editor tool and found discrepancies in Notes:

Notes in Root container
00000000F9D0489742D7B848B39AF20360B824DE01006353D4DC26523B4587F5254CC0DD8951000017D49EB50000

Notes in Top of Information Store
0000000091120EDDF117F043AC860848CE1C39020100ACC35E4A748E594C86E473EDA151DAF30000062F03620000

Usage of MFCMAPi can be lethal for a mailbox when done by inexperienced end user so to make things easier there’s a workaround to be performed on end users’ end:

This is to run Outlook with /resetfolders parameter and it should do the trick (Start > Run > Outlook.exe /resetfolders). Please note this switch needs to be run against Outlook profile setup without Cache mode.
After that the same values should become identical.

Once the properties mismatch is fixed the reactivation should go smooth.