BES on private blackberry to get work emails

[Andrea22]

Hello.  I have problems getting BES on my phone to get my work emails.

Basically, I have a private blackberry 9790 on a monthly plan.  To get my work emails I phoned up and they said I can have BES enabled for an extra £2.50 a month, so I said yes.  My work has a BES server and gave me an activation password. 

Now when I tried to activate it I got an error that the server is not responding.  The VF helpline told me to go to advanced settings and click on 'register now'.  After I did that I didn't get the enterprise activation option any more but instead it seemed to have logged on to BIS instead.

If I wipe the phone I get the BES activation again but it won't activate, when I 'register now' I don't get it again, so I don't get anywhere with this.

I phoned the VF helpline again and now they are saying it doesn't work because I can't have BES on a private plan (which is odd since I was charged £2.50 for exactly this), but I can't have a business plan either since I don't have a business....

Surely there must be a way to get work email on a private phone, can anyone help?  If VF can't do it, anyone know if O2 can? 

Thanks,

Andrea

[grolschuk]

£2.50 sounds rather cheap for a BES Bolt-On, I'd have expected the . to be another place to the right.

There can sometimes be issues if the handset is dual-provisioned with both BIS and BES as they start to conflct with each other.

Hopefully someone in customer services, live chat, or the forum team (when they get to your question sometime tomorrow), will be able to take a look and see what services are attached or not.

By default the BES server only keeps a new activation password open for 48 hours, so if it took longer than that for you to try to activate after being given the details, you may need to get back in touch with your IT team.

I am guessing that your signal indicator (gprs/edge/3g) is in capital letters, as lower case will mean no blackberry services enabled.

I hope something above may help narrow down your problem.

[Andrea22]

Thanks for the quick reply.  I don't know what price to expect, originally in the shop I was told BES would be part of my plan already, so far I'm not impressed with the customer service, they keep contradicting each other...

I've given up on customer service since they told me I can't have it and my work needs to sign a contract for me, which seems rather silly if that's really the case.  They did say BES was attached but would not work on a private phone, but surely there must be some solution, fingers crossed.

The 3G etc is in capitals and I get the 'blackberry dots' as well since you asked.

And yes, the activation password already ran out three times (I've been trying for while), I've requested a new one.

Thanks.

[grolschuk]

I'm going to guess that the people in the shop heard BIS when you asked for BES, as that does come with the plan and is pretty standard for personal blackberrys.

They probably hadn't even been asked about BES before, so assumed you were spelling it wrong

Certainly one for the forum team to look at, they are very good at getting to the bottom of account related niggles and mishaps, however they are only a small team and very busy, so are currently running at around 24 hours to get to new questions.

Once they get here, expect a PM with a link asking for account details that you wouldn't want to be posting on a public forum, once data protection has been passed I imagine it will be quite a simple fix.

For the price, if you ask your IT guys how much they pay for a BES bolt-on, i'd expect it to be around £25, minus any bulk discounts they have been able to negotiate... Just so that does not come as a shock if you can get it added to your account.

[Andrea22]

Thanks again. In the shop I  'spelt it out' so to speak, ie I explained I didn't mean the Internet Server but the Enterprise Server, they sounded like they knew what they were talking about.

I'll see if someone responds here then, no problem waiting a bit.

I wonder what they added then for £2.50, I definitely got an 'enterprise server' activation window afterwards which looked promising...  £25 is a bit of a shock but my work is paying anyway.

[Retired-Andy]

Hi Andrea22,

We can certainly look into this for you.

Click here to send us your details.

Thanks,

Andy

[Andrea22]

Thanks Andy, I sent my details.  I hope you can shed some light on this.

[grolschuk]

If you don't mind posting back to let us know how you get on, I'll be interested to see the outcome as to what has happened, and if BES isn't avaiable on personal accounts.

[Andrea22]

Will do.

[Andrea22]

I've had a reply from VF, they think BIS and BES are interfering with each other and will disable BIS and enable BES again for £2.50 + VAT = £3.

I'll let you know if that works, I'm waiting for a new activation password from my work first.