I’ve done two BlackBerry BES upgrades over the last few months and I’ve got to admit that each time I crack open the upgrade guides I feel a little intimidated. Now you have to give BlackBerry credit for being thorough. They list every detail from preupgrade tasks to post upgrade tasks to doing in-place upgrades vs.doing a cutover upgrade. The number of choices presented can (for me anyway) be a little stressful. And many of the details only fit if you’re doing a brand new installation. What if I only want to upgrade an existing install?
My environment was relatively simple: Windows 2003 server running BES 5.0.1, Lotus Domino 8.5 FP2 and Microsoft MSDE running on the same box. I could afford about an hour’s worth of downtime as long as the upgrade was done after my organization’s main business hours.
I called BlackBerry’s competent (I’ve worked with many different support centers and believe me competent is a big compliment) support line and asked the technician to list the basic upgrade steps for my environment.
Here they are:
- Stop all BES services in this order: Controller, Dispatcher, Router… (the other BES services can be stopped in any order).
- Backup the BESMgmt database. I created a small batch file with the following line (run the batch file and the result is nice export of your database to a .bak file.):
BlackBerryDbBackup.exe -d BESMgmt -f c:\backup –E
- Run the besn_upgrader_5.0.2.exe installation
- After about 25 minutes the installer prompted me to reboot the server. After the reboot, I logged in and the installation/setup process continued. At the end of the setup, all BES services were started automatically.
In conclusion, the upgrade was a positive experience. We have about 70 BlackBerry users and the entire upgrade process took about 45 minutes.
I took some screenshots of the install process for those who would like to see some of the screens before they do the upgrade themselves:
