Auditing BlackBerry SMS and PIN Messages and Viewing PIN logs Messages on BES

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Customer often asked if it is possible to log all BlackBerry PIN and SMS messages. Yes, it is possible. If you are the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) Administrator or experienced vendor who actually went through the BlackBerry Partner exams common sense tell us that PIN messages and SMS are not part of BES. Hence, we naturally thought it is NOT possible to log or audit it. As the matter of fact, these logging/ audit features are an exception.

It turned out that BES 4.1 support this. KB05024 explains the steps required to perform just that. Audit log location will be populated daily with folder named after yyyymmdd format.

The log covers some pretty serious and wealthy of information such as “Name.ID”,”Email Address”,”Type of Message”,”To”,”From”,”Callback Phone Number”,”Body”,”Send/Received Date”,”Server Log Date”,”Overall Message Status”,”Command”,”UID”.

As you can see it raises some privacy concern and whether is a good thing to do that. It may subject to abuse and believe me not, I’m sure some corporate executives may think that PIN and SMS are safer than corporate email. Not with BlackBerry! On the other hand this feature is good and excellent feature to log all communication and for compliancy purpose such as for the government and military, where transmission of data is viewed as serious threat. So be sure to table out with your corporate executives and make it an IT policy whether or not to include this feature, protect the audit directory with NTFS security and assigned only designated user account to it.

To organize, retrieve and make the raw/ logged data from the BES useful, readable and presentable for compliance purpose, check out this product from RETAIN.

There is also a blog comment about the product written by Robb Dunewood.

Chee