BlackBerry Activation Troubleshooting

I had much of the info below, but not all of it and as concisely as below.
EA = Enterprise Activation
EA is only accessible if your administrator has provided an E-Mail account on an Exchange Server (Possibly other servers but largely Exchange) AND - You have BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Server) activated from your carrier - which you must pay an extra fee for that service.


I copied the following from the following forum post:

http://supportforums.blackberry.com/t5/BlackBerry-Enterprise-Solution/Cannot-activate-new-user-stuck-on-initializing/td-p/2580

ron0mac-AT-G--Mail


Re: Cannot activate new user - stuck on 'initializing'


The basic EA troubleshooting would involve a couple of check points.

1. Add user to BlackBerry Manager

- Check in the application log (hit F5 or Refresh if required) to see messages like
"User Added to BES" (successfully added user to BlackBerry Enterprise Server and will monitor users mailbox)
"1 user failed to initialize"
(you will be unable to activate that user if this message shows up)

- This ensures proper permissions set for EA to complete and the mailbox advise session is established



2. Check user is in sufficient wireless coverage

- Due to different "Themes" developed for BlackBerry devices, reading the number of Bars available is sometimes not accurate, check the "Options - Status" menu for signal strength, anything below

-90dbm (by this I mean -99dbm is worse signal strength as compared to -90dbm) can cause issues during Enterprise Activation



3. Check for the ETP.dat message in users inbox (if it's arriving there is it being modified by a spam filter/AVirus software)

- If that etp.dat message is not arriving, as recommended above in the thread, try and activating with a hotmail/google mail/yahoo email address to check if the etp.dat email arrives into those email
address


- This step ensures device provisioning from your wireless carrier and sufficient wireless coverage at least to start the EA
(if signal strength fluctuates and constantly drops during EA, the
process will stop at different points)



4. Assuming the above 3 criterion are met, I would recommend right clicking choosing "Reload User", which forces a mailbox rescan for the user, during which the etp.dat message should be picked up
to kick start the EA process



5. If the etp.dat email message is sitting in the mailbox and not being picked up, it would be BlackBerry Enterprise Server related



6. If this message never ends up in the mailbox, it could be either due to provisioning or being blocked/lost in transition which would have nothing to do with the BlackBerry Enterprise Server



7. One of the other troubleshooting steps performed from an administrators end to verify if the etp.dat email message is actually arriving and being picked up is as follows
- Remove User from BlackBerry Manager
- Ask user to activate from BlackBerry device with their email address and a simple password eg: 'a'
- Wait for the etp.dat to arrive in their mailbox, since the user does not exist on the BlackBerry Enterprise Server there is no reason this email should not be in the "Inbox"
- Please ensure this email does not end up in a different folder like "Junk Mail" since the email header at this point is already modified by your mail/spam filters for BlackBerry Server to

realize this is the activation email

- If the message arrives, at this point you can go ahead and add the user to the BlackBerry Manager, set their EA password to what they used to start EA from their device, in this case lower case

'a' was our example, and the etp.dat message should be picked up (assuming permissions are set properly please refer to step 1 to verify you see a response in the application log after adding user
to BlackBerry Manager)


A quick search in our knowledge base:
http://www.blackberry.com/support

Keyword: Enterprise Activation

Will yield some very useful articles for you to comprise your own checklist for smooth and successful Enterprise Activation
Message Edited by Beholder on 04-22-2009 10:57 AM