Things I learned this week
Yes, you can force a password change on a Blackberry wireless device from the server even when the device’s wireless is turned off. You have to connect it to your desktop for it to get the updated password though.
That’s how I was able to get into my device again and use it to get email. Of course, since we’re now up to 7 keys that don’t work I really can’t reply in any effective manner to those messages. A replacement can not get here fast enough, but it hasn’t even been ordered yet. *sigh*
Update: Our telecom guy figured out how to replace a keyboard on a Blackberry while I was out on Friday. So today (Monday) he grabbed mine and tried the same thing, only it wasn’t the keyboard that had a problem it was a couple of layers underneath that, a contact board. He managed to replace that with one from an old one and it works again!
Thing #2 I learned this week is that you have to be really careful sending meeting invites to a distribution list in Outlook. Let’s say you have a distribution list with 7 folks on it and you send a meeting request through your Exchange environment. Let’s also say that 5 of them accept and 2 can’t make it, so you decide to move it to a smaller room. When you update the meeting place you go ahead and only address the update to the 5 people who replied. However, when Outlook looks at your original meeting it says “oh this distribution list was invited and now it isn’t included in the invite, so let’s send them a cancellation notice.” So those 5 people get both an update and a cancellation. If they open the update, accept, and then open the cancellation, it may get removed from their calendar completely. Not good. Remedy? Expand the distribution list to show the individuals before you send the original meeting request. That will force Outlook to see them all as individuals and not the list. (I’m not sure what versions of Outlook/Exchange this exists in or if any don’t handle distribution lists the same way.)
Thing #3? A cached DNS entry resolving a machine name to the wrong IP address can seriously screw up all of your well-laid plans for using Remote Desktop to get around using roaming profiles or folder redirection when you have people logging on in different places. In theory, no matter where in the building they physically are, they can remote back to their desktop and work without having to do anything with profiles. In this case, I was able to use the IP instead of the machine name and it worked fine, but it wasn’t exactly smooth.
What did you learn?
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