It’s been a while since I’ve done a ‘Show-n-Tell’, and I meant to do this a few weeks ago, but ‘baby’ happens…

One of our sites were going to have major electrical work done over the weekend, which meant that the Domino Server at that site would have to go down.

We had no problem with this, but the BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) was going to scream that it could not access the data for those users located there. We had to find a way to prevent the BES from kicking back error after error.

Thanks to RIM Support and my colleague, a way was discovered, and it was very simple.

From the Blackberry Manager, select ‘User Groups’, then create a group for your users. (In my case, my group name was ‘SiteName Users’.) Next, select the server, then right click on the column header to get to the Column Chooser dialog box. Add ‘Mail Server’ to the visible columns, then select OK. Now sort on that column, then select all of the users that are on the server in question. Next, right click, and select ‘Assign to Group’, then select the group you just created.

Now that you have all of the users from a specific server in a group, you can go back to ‘User Groups’, then select and right click on the group, and select ‘Disable Redirection’ like in the picture below:

It takes a while, but it eventually tells the BES to stop ‘talking’ with the user stuff.

Once the servers were back up online, I went in and enabled redirection:

After that, everything was gravy.

I hope that this tip helps others… Let me know in the comments!