Uh Clem's Admin World

Alex Kassabov blogged about his experience with Maui Jim's excellent customer service with their sunglasses repair.  I too have had great experience with their customer service.   Ten bucks with the sunglasses shipped off to Maui Jim and they are returned in two weeks repaired, no questions asked.

I was reflecting on the fact that excellent customer service is a rarity these days.   The problem with it being rare is that when you encounter it, you start thinking about all those other experiences with average or poor customer service, and it starts to get depressing and frustrating.

I guess I need to let these experiences influence me more and start patronizing those vendors with the best customer service, and avoid those with bad customer service.  If only we could do this more, then vendors would start to "get it" and, hopefully, influence them to change.

Many times debugging problems with a Blackberry leads back to the Service Books (SB's).  Sometimes you are told (by tech support) to delete a service book, then undelete it.  Sometimes you can clear a problem by resending the service books from the BES server.  However this only sends a subset of the service books listed.

Another little known function on the Blackberry will pull down a new set of service books from the service provider.  It is accomplished by performing  Options - Advanced Options - Host Routing Table - menu key - Register Now.

Between resending the SB's from the BES and pulling down new SB's from the service provider you think you could clear any problems.   But no, sometimes even this doesn't work.  Another, painful option is to first delete all the service books, one at a time, then pull down both sets of SB's again.  Since this is such a pain I'm sure most of us just revert to wiping the darned thing and re-activating it.  Yep, me too.

Anyone have any other tips or tricks regarding Blackberry service books?

I configured my two clustered 8.0.2 mail servers to run out-of-office as a service about 3 weeks ago.  I decided to take a look at how that was working, so I ran:

tell router O  > returned 11 users
tell amgr sched > OutOfOffice agent running for 9 users

What? I expected everyone to be running OOO as a service now.  All clients are on 8.0.2 and all mail files are on the mail8.ntf template.

It turns out that 2 criteria must be met before a mailbox will be registered to run OOO as a service:

1.  The user must have turned ON the OOO since the servers were configured to run OOO as a service.  If a user never turned off their OOO from the last time they were out and just reconfigured the dates, then it will not switch to OOO as a service.
2. The user must receive an email after turning on the OOO in step 1.  This is the trigger that tells the mailbox to stop using the agent and use the service instead.

So when you configure your OOO to run as a service, it may take a while for all the mail files to be registered to run it as a service rather than an agent.    You may need to monitor the mail files over time to see who is still running the OOO agent (using "tell amgr sched").  For them you may need to make sure they have turned off the OOO after their previous time out.