Yet more requests...

In one of our larger BES environments, we have a request to keep the device software upgraded to at least n-1 and to report monthly on which devices are 'old' and/or have 'outdated' firmware.

You know all these many years (now a decade) that we have been using Blackberry devices, we have always treated firmware upgrades on line with BIOS upgrades for PCs... not like PC OS SPs and HFs. i.e. we only did them to fix a defined problem/issue. So really there was no push to keep them very current.

We roll Blackberry handhelds out with the latest at the time, and if we are doing something 'related' we will bring them up-to-date as well. 'related' would be like setting up SMIME on the device. At that point we upgrade the device software while we are at it.

Also this is the first time we have been asked by our internal customers to report on device age, and OS rev age. Our monthly reports of course already report model #, OS/platform version #, etc. but that's not exactly the same thing. They are looking for us to interpret that type of version data and let them know things like 'how old is the device' , and 'how old is the firmware on it' .

For the device model age, we could make a 'model' table with a 'release date' to cross reference. Shouldn't be too hard to maintain. But what about the device software? We haven't started using OTASL device upgrades yet. Likely this will be a big part of the solution for actually keeping them up-to-date, but I'm still wondering on how to report n-1... to do so I would have to have historic data to device OS versions. Perhaps I could pull the OTASL data from the DB as mentioned in the post "OTASL - Official BES Provisioned Versions ". I haven't looked for it yet but that post seems to indicate potential various versions from a carrier per model. Even if that could be used and parsed correctly, it would be with the caveat that the version 'age' would be based on what was available OTASL from the carrier and may not be in line with what can be installed via a wired upgrade.

Any ideas?

As no one here seems to have any idea... I guess it is time to throw a DART at it. Though I really don't think they will be much help here.

I guess I should post on BBF too as it seems to still get more BESadmin posts still.

If you find something post back here - I'd be curious to know what you find out. Also, what are you using to do your monthly reports?

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JohnP
Forgive me...just a newb!