How to remove a hidden user from a BES server

There are situations when a user you deleted at some point may become hidden on a BlackBerry Enterprise Server and never really was removed from the database. This is a lost user in the BES database that somehow needs to be removed or it will cause problems. You can see this lost user is taking up a license in the Blackberry Manager but you can’t actually find the user using the GUI. An example of a problem this can cause is if you try to add a user to your BES and you know you have enough licenses, but it gives you an error message saying:

“The number of users selected exceeds the number of available licenses. Please select a fewer number of users to add.”

Here is a quick way of finding the hidden user and deleting the account. Just make sure your database is backed up just incase before you begin. Then open up a command line and type in:
osql -E

Then type these commands for each line (I am going to assume you have named your SQL database the default name of BESMgmt:
1>use BESMgmt
2>select DisplayName from UserConfig
3>go

This will show you all the different users in your database. Find the user you need to remove and then type in:
1>use BESMgmt
2>delete from UserConfig where DisplayName="John Doe"
3>go


The other option that can fix remove a deleted user is by using the DBClean tool from RIM. I have hosted it here on my blog since it’s hard to find this tool sometimes.

Jason Samuel

Jason Samuel is a visionary product leader and trusted advisor with a proven track record of shaping strategy and driving technology innovation. With extensive expertise in enterprise end-user computing, security, cloud, automation, and virtualization technologies, Jason has become a globally recognized authority in the IT industry. His career spans consulting for hundreds of Fortune 500 enterprises across diverse business sectors worldwide, delivering cutting-edge digital solutions from Citrix, Microsoft, VMware, Amazon, Google, and NVIDIA that seamlessly balance security with exceptional user experiences.

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