More BlackBerry 4.0 Tips and Tricks

Some of you have business environments in which Research in Motion (RIM) BlackBerry devices are essential tools. In fact, as I discussed in "BlackBerry 4.0 Tips and Tricks," January 2006, InstantDoc ID 48240, many administrators consider the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) to be a mission-critical component of IT services. In that article, I provided you with a number of tips and tricks for getting a handle on your Black-Berry-related tasks; I looked at email redirection, connectivity monitoring, and logging. In this follow-up article, I'd like to tell you about a few other sources of valuable data—both user and device-related—relevant to Black-Berry administration.

User Statistics
In addition to the BES logs, user statistics is another important information source you should periodically check. In particular, two types of user statistics are worthy of close inspection: pending delivery count and last handheld contact time. Pending delivery count gives you the number of messages that are queued on the BES for delivery to the handheld device. Last handheld contact time shows you the most recent moment that the BES received a delivery confirmation or command from the device. You can view both of these statistics from BlackBerry Manager, which Figure 1 shows. The Pending column displays the pending delivery count, and the Last contact time column displays the most recent contact. . . .