I have been very excited to see latest Kerio Mail Server (KMS) brings Blackberry Enterprise Server connectivity. It uses Kerio Blackberry Connector (KBC) to create a MAPI connection to make BES think it is connecting to an Exchange server.

For testing, I tried to create a single server install, but this didn’t work. Here is the dilemma. KMS and KBC installs fine to a single server. But when I go ahead with BES Express install, during the Blackberry Administration Service install, it tries to query Active Directory and Kerio’s own LDAP will not handle this.

So as a workaround, I tried to install KMS first, run dcpromo to setup Active Directory. I had to move Kerio’s LDAP server to different ports, as it was running at ports 389 and 636 used by AD. So far so good. However, this time, KBC is not aware of port change and for some reason during its setup it queries LDAP (even though the account it was using was using internal DB). Of course the query fails, as it hits AD.

So, for testing I’ll have to create to servers, one running AD and possibly KBC and BESX and one running KMS. I wish Kerio would make KBC aware of which LDAP ports KMS is running at. One can only dream