Mirroring the Global Address List on Blackberries
- by Wyatt Barnett
In times immemorial, back in the day when men were men and blackberries still took AA batteries, we rolled them out to our users for our 100 person operation. At that time, there was no such thing as address list lookups, so we were forced to hack a bit. The ingenious hack we came up with was to mirror the GAL as a public folder and then synch up blackberries to that. While there have been a few downsides here and there, they have been mere annoyances. And our users, having grown fat and prosperous in the intervening years, have been used to seeing every single employee and department here listed on their hand-held automatically.
Alas, it appears that Outlook 2010 breaks this functionality as Blackberry desktop manager is completely incompatible with it. Moreover, this presents us with an opportunity to change things for the better given that public folders are going away next time we upgrade exchange.
So, we are in search of a tool or technique that will allow us to mimic current functionality--that is to:
Push an essentially arbitrary list
of ~100 contacts to blackberry
address books
Said list shall be
centrally updated
Without requiring desktop manager or exchange public folders.
Any suggestions, crowd?