How to sync (or at least view) public / team / shared calendar to Blackberry using BES?

Question

Trying to allow 3 people to view and ideally sync (create/edit) common (team) calendar events via Blackberry and hosted Exchange 2007 BES. My understanding is that BES does not support anything other than a users primary calendar to be synced wirelessly.

From what I've researched the only supported workflow is for user to create event in public calendar on Outlook and then invites team members individually as optional attendees so event displays in their calendar (and on their Blackberry).

I've seen some 3rd party utilities that claim to support syncing of public folders/calendars:

• Add2Outlook: http://www.diditbetter.com/add2outlook.aspx
• WICKSoft: http://www.wicksoft.com/contacts_calendars.htm (needs to be installed on local Exchange server)

I've also been told I can sync public/other calendars using Desktop Manager, but I need to avoid any tethered sync with this environment.

Am I missing an easier workflow here? There must be tens of thousands of BES users that require the ability to/view share a public, shared or team calendar on their Blackberry. How can I solve this?

Answer 1

There is an option to use Easy2Sync. I've setup Easy2Sync with Outlook on a dedicated VM just for this. There is a public calendar and contacts folder, to and from which, calendar items, and contact items are synced and given a category of "Public", so the BB users can filter when required.

BES 5.0 also natively allows for public folder syncing from Exchange