Installing BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express on a Small Business Server 2003 Premium (SBS 2003) is not as easy as it looks. The documentation from BlackBerry is not complete and difficult to understand. I have decided to write documentation with all screenshots for this installation. My customer has an excisting SBS 2003 Premium SP1 (not R2) so we will install a new SQL 2000 named instance and create a BES service account that will run the BES software.

 

This document assumes that you have downloaded the Black Berry Enterprise Express software from the BlackBerry website. Before we can install the BESExpress software there are several things we need to do on the SBS 2003 Server. Most import step is that we create a BES service account that will run the BlackBerry Enterprise server.

Because of the release of the iPhone, there has been an increase in interest in configuring IMAP and POP3 services on SBS servers. In this author's opinion, providing access to e-mail via IMAP is better than POP3. The approach of IMAP more closely emulates how Exchange provides e-mail services in that messages are maintained on the server, and the IMAP client only pulls down what is needed. There are still security issues with IMAP, however, in that the default protocol still transmits the username and password information across the internet in clear text, and even though fewer sniffers are trained on IMAP ports to try and discover account credentials, the risk is still there.

 

To help protect account credentials, as well as e-mail contents, IMAP can be set up over SSL, which encrypts the entire transaction process, not just username and password. The iPhone and other devices can be easily set up to use IMAP over SSL, but you have to first set up the Exchange server on SBS to provide the secure mail transport. This document covers this implementation with SBS 2003 and ISA 2004. A separate document has been created for the process to follow with SBS 2003 Standard.

Because of the release of the iPhone, there has been an increase in interest in configuring IMAP and POP3 services on SBS servers. In this author's opinion, providing access to e-mail via IMAP is better than POP3. The approach of IMAP more closely emulates how Exchange provides e-mail services in that messages are maintained on the server, and the IMAP client only pulls down what is needed. There are still security issues with IMAP, however, in that the default protocol still transmits the username and password information across the internet in clear text, and even though fewer sniffers are trained on IMAP ports to try and discover account credentials, the risk is still there.

 

To help protect account credentials, as well as e-mail contents, IMAP can be set up over SSL, which encrypts the entire transaction process, not just username and password. The iPhone and other devices can be easily set up to use IMAP over SSL, but you have to first set up the Exchange server on SBS to provide the secure mail transport. This document covers this implementation with SBS 2003 Standard and no ISA. You will need to configure your firewall to forward the appropriate ports to the SBS server, which is beyond the scope of this document.

Connecting a remote Windows 2003 server to a SBS 2003 Premium is probably one of the most requested procedures in our forums. After working several days on this subject, I have written an article that describes the configuration on the SBS 2003 Premium and the remote Windows 2003 Server. The remote server is not yet joined or promoted; it is just a plain vanilla Windows 2003 server. We start using standard PPtP, in a future article we will make it more secure by using IPsec. The chapters in this article are: