Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Welcome!

Some of you may have been working with BerryStats for the last couple years. It is a web-driven interface which allows some basic reporting and administration for the BlackBerry environment.

BerryStats, circa 2005

Originally conceptualized by Brent Grim, BerryStats was a quick and dirty filtered and sortable report which accessed a custom view inserted into the BesMgmt database. This report was extremely useful to get an idea of who hadn't communicated with the server for a period of time, message forwarding stats, network information, etc. - Extremely useful information to have ready for management.

A few users including myself from BlackBerryForums.com decided to enhance BerryStats (and a PHP-based offshoot) by adding more statistics, a cleaner interface, and other additional features.

BerryStats .31qc_metal edition, circa 2006

In 2006, I added additional functionality to BerryStats ASP by including an interface for the BesUserAdminClient (allowing user adds and changes from the web) Resource Kit utility, basic service tasks, and pie charts for reporting purposes.

User information page, .31qc_metal edition

BerryStats ASP was featured in a presentation at the WES 2007 conference, little to my knowledge -

Alas, in November of 2006, I was laid off with 9 other IT personnel from my company, and could not develop BerryStats any further since I did not have a server to test with or access.

I had a short stint at a local manufacturing company here in Rockford, IL from December '06 thru August of '07, but hated it with a passion, so I moved on to a local Orthopedic clinic that month as Network Administrator. Fortunately for me (and a lot of other people!), doctors need phone and email capability on the same device, so I have been lucky to convince one of the docs here to make the switch from Windows Mobile to BlackBerry - with great success.

So, now I have a reason to use BES again - granted, not in the same capacity that I previously had, but this nonetheless allows me to continue working on BerryStats.

As a result, I hope to chronicle the development of BerryStats ASP, help anyone out who experiences troubles while using & installing (this seems to be the biggest problem right now) it, and get ideas from others about how we should move forward with the project.

I will tell you right now, my code is sloppy, but it does seem to work ;) - - if you are a programmer/coder, you are welcome to modify the code and trim it up a bit, that would be much appreciated. You will definitely be credited for your efforts here.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

It looks like the sql view in berrystats will not poll the entire exchange server name from the serverDN dir. In 2007 Microsoft has changed this field spacing in the DN. So the string is longer in 2007 then 2003. The string in 2007 and 2003 I have pasted below....
================================================== =====
/o=Cargill/ou=Exchange Administrative Group (FYDIBOHF23SPDLT)/cn=Configuration/cn=Servers/cn="My 2007 Exchange Server Name"/cn=Microsoft Private MDB
================================================== ======
/o=Cargill/ou=First Administrative Group/cn=Configuration/cn=Servers/cn=="My 2007 Exchange Server Name"/cn=Microsoft Private MDB
================================================== =====

In the SQL view it polls the server name by using
SUBSTRING(CAST(dbo.UserConfig.ServerDN AS varchar(100)), PATINDEX('%Servers/cn=%',
dbo.UserConfig.ServerDN) + 11, PATINDEX('%/cn=Microsoft%', dbo.UserConfig.ServerDN) - (PATINDEX('%Servers/cn=%', dbo.UserConfig.ServerDN)
+ 11)) AS ExchServer

Going forward with exchange 2007 you will not be able to use this because the spacing is different on the server DN.
Berrystats only polls the first 7 digits and does not give you the entire exchange server name for that field.

If anyone has worked on this please let me know.