Always keep older versions of your Java apps on BES

24 September 2008 by Alex Laurie

Here’s a service management problem we’ve seen with customers recently. When updating to new versions of Java applications on your BES the natural tendency for an administrator may be to delete the old apps from the \program files\common files\research in motion\shared\applications folder – it’s a good house-keeping principle.

But if you’re administrating a large deployment of BlackBerrys, our advice is don’t.

Why? Because it prevents BES from remotely managing and removing the application, and in larger scale BlackBerry deployments you can’t guarantee that all the devices will be on and in a position to update at the moment that you (or your administrator) push out an application update.

If you delete older versions of your application from the applications folder (the .alx and .cod files), your BES server will no longer be able to remove that application remotely.

In that scenario, a user comes back from annual leave two weeks after the application update, turns on their device, and if BES can no longer delete the old version, they could see both versions of the application on their device. At best that’ll confuse the user, at worst it could lead to application conflicts.

So the simple service management rule is always leave old apps on the BES server, and instead change their disposition to disallowed in the relevant software configurations.

Click image to see it larger.

That way, your users’ devices will update properly as and when they switch their device on.

1. 
   — Christopher    16 October 2008, 11:44    #
2. 
   — Alex Laurie    21 October 2008, 09:10    #

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