Blackberry Playbook --> Exchange, sans ActiveSync?

[FanIn80]

I have a client who would like his Playbook to sync with his company's Exchange server, but unfortunately the ActiveSync service is "borked" here (as far as I'm being told).

Short of pushing for clearance to fix their ActiveSync issues (whatever they may be), is there any way I can get his Exchange account up and running on his Playbook without ActiveSync? They even run a BES, which apparently does not support the Playbook...

Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

[sclitheroe]

Playbook supports ActiveSync? That's crazy - they are paying MS a licensing fee for that, and yet they aren't supporting their own BES infrastructure yet.

[FanIn80]

Tell me about it.

[Rathji]

Let me first disclaim: I am not a big exchange guy, I know enough to make it work and make sure people get their mail, most of the time. That means a lot of what I say here could be wrong, so research it before taking action.

As I understand it, the only way you can access exchange without involving ActiveSync (or another server that redirects mail, like BES) is to enable POP or IMAP in your Exchange, since they are disabled by default. Your Blackberry will allow you to manually set up either type of account under Advanced Settings in Accounts. This should work, but I don't know enough about it without doing some research that I would allow it where I work. The one thing I am pretty sure of is that there would be no way to enforce a device having a password or anything else that ActiveSync might enforce upon devices that I am clueless about.

My advice is to try and get them to fix (or let you fix) Exchange. Much better in the long run.

[TorqueDog]

x2 to Rathji's post - best solution, fix ActiveSync. Second solution, enable POP or IMAP. Otherwise, you could tell the guy to use OWA on his Playbook browser, but I see that going over rather poorly.