While troubleshooting with Blackberry technical support on issues related to Blackberry Work, I was asked to provide logs from this app. It turns out the logs generated from Blackberry Work provide not only useful information for troubleshooting but also an opportunity to acquire a deeper understanding of how Blackberry Work communicates with Blackberry Dynamics NOC to access Microsoft Exchange on the internal network.
For this post, I will loosely follow the Blackberry KB below.
BlackBerry Work Diagnostics Tests
To start, launch Blackberry Work and press the Blackberry Launcher icon. Then tap the gear icon.
Under Settings, press Run Diagnostics. Then follow the remaining screenshots below.
If you choose to share the logs, the files are supposed to be zipped per Blackberry KB (sample files were provided from the same KB for your reference as well).
However, I only see a single text file for all the tests result. Blackberry support claims this is the case going forward. What I hope to see should be similar to the below.
Fortunately, you can copy the text within and paste into a new email within Blackberry Work and email it to yourself or anyone else who may be interested.
I will now use these logs to determine the impact of disabling external Exchange Web Services (EWS) access through your firewall or maybe load balancer (i.e. Citrix Netscaler) on Blackberry Work with UEM and BEMS hosted in the cloud. Let’s start with why EWS may be required for Blackberry Work.
- As a reminder, Blackberry Work relies on EWS for the features below:
- Calendar Attachments
- Contact Group Sync (or Personal Distribution Lists)
- Per another Blackberry KB, BEMS Cloud must be able to reach the mail server for push notification (under Resolution for Cause 2).
Point #2 above doesn’t clarify the relationship between Blackberry Work and your on-premises mail environment. In fact, your ActiveSync data from Microsoft Exchange should travel through an encrypted channel between Blackberry Dynamics NOC and Blackberry Proxy within your Blackberry Connectivity Node if it’s setup. However, EWS endpoint must be externally accessible from BEMS cloud directly.
Now let’s take a look at the logs from Blackberry Work and see how they support the statement above.
From the Exchange Connections test, it confirms the URL for EWS.
From the Mobility Servers test, we can see Blackberry Work communicates with BEMS in the cloud.
From the Network Diagnostics test, we see that Blackberry Work also communicates with EWS via Blackberry Connectivity Node (BCN). Since BEMS is hosted outside of on-premise mail environment, it must be able to reach the EWS endpoint specified under the Exchange Connections test.
As always, stay mobile!
