Cowell Computer Consulting

Most of the people I know, who have anything more than a basic phone, have bought iPhones. Some people have chosen to stick with the 'venerable' Blackberry. Configuring email on blackberry's can be a pain in the ass sometimes. I know there's built in email activation on the blackberry, but that requires you to have access to the unit. Some of the people I support live thousands of kilometers away and in different time zones, so that doesn't always work.

In theory, if there were a web page I could change the settings at, I could avoid lengthy support calls and configure their email myself. For some reason blackberry doesn't want you to know this, but each company that offers blackberries has their own portal on the blackberry site. In fact, the service providers (Rogers, ATT, Verizon) don't seem to really want you to know this either because it's proven to be almost impossible to find this sort of info on their sites.

OK, so here's the trick - use google. Let's say I want to find the Rogers portal, craft a search like this:

rogers site:blackberry.com inurl:brand

Obviously you substitute the company you're looking for with rogers.

site: just tells google to limit the search to blackberry.com.

inurl: tell google to ensure that the word brand is in the url.

Here's a few providers:

http://bis.na.blackberry.com/html?brand=rogers
http://bis.na.blackberry.com/html?brand=telus
http://bis.na.blackberry.com/html?brand=mycingular
http://bis.na.blackberry.com/html?brand=vzw   <—Verizon

I just don't understand why this has to be some complicated....