Added some new content on Mar 23. See the very end.

I want to kill myself. Scratch that, too dramatic. I want to kill someone at RIM. Scratch that, too threatening. How bout this: I want to kill everything.

Migrating Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010. Standalone BES 5 server. Want to do a careful migration, not moving forward with one task until the other one is working flawlessly, so I want BES working so we don’t have to rush the migration of all of the mailboxes. Followed the instructions, moved the BESAdmin mailbox, adjusted MAPI profile, and mail works but the BES server throws constant errors into the Windows application log. I have been working on this for hours.

MailboxManager::CreateProfile (BES_CDO_5264_E) – ConfigureMsgService (80040115) – Ensure that IPv6 is disabld on the Exchange Server or configure the BES to use the closest global catalog server

For real, I was at it for hours and tried everything I could find. The issue appeared to be the way Exchange 2010 handles access to the mailbox to create calendar events. It looks in AD for the server holding the database and tries to connect directly instead of connecting to the CAS machine, which is the Exchange 2010. It fails but if you run IEMSTest.EXE and feed it the CAS server name, it completes. This is a problem with CDO and it cannot be fixed.

The solution, after hours of trial and error, was to follow the Blackberry KB20157 and set BES to use Exchange Web Services (EWS) for calendar access instead of CDO. This scoots around the problem by using the newer, more robust EWS API. IEMSTest still bombs out but the event log on the BES is much happier and calendar events sync correctly. Follow the instructions carefully. I did an IISRESET on each Exchange server at the end and then rebooted BES to be sure.

If this helps you or you have thoughts or information, please get in touch. I’d love to know if this helps anyone or if I could have done something differently to prevent the problem entirely.

UPDATE ON MARCH 23: It appears that this is caused by disabled Outlook Anywhere on the Exchange 2007 server. Every document I found said that you must do this for coexistence though none specify why and I’m still not sure; regardless, enable Outlook Anywhere, give it some time to become active, and it will work. IEMSTest now completes and some other goofy problems I was having with configuring new Outlook users are all resolved. How frustrating.