GoodLink Tips...

As posted at PalmAddicts... and at Treobits...

I recently had a problem with changes in our Exchange's Global Address Book (GAB) not propagating out to our Treo's running GoodLink. After speaking with GL support, they introduced me to a nice trick I hadn't learned yet: 'reprov'. 'reprov' is short for reprovision. Basically, you get into the Today screen of GL, hold down the shift key and type "DEBUG". You'll see a command line and you enter 'reprov' <enter>. It'll ask you to confirm, enter 'y' <enter> and your device will reset. After the reset turn on your phone and get a data conn, then press a GL button and you'll see the fourth stage of the GL installer which basically connects to your server and re-downloads your email, calendar, contacts, tasks, notes, etc.

This little trick proved to be quite helpful recently. One of my users has a lot of email in sub-folders of his Inbox and they were all sync'ing in GL. After a few months time, he would encounter an issue where he'd hear the new mail chime in GL, then his device would reset. It turns out he had too much mail and the amount of memory that GL reserved at startup wasn't sufficient and resulted in resets. Rather than reload everything (which is what GL wanted us to do... they actually wanted a hard reset, reload of GL, then all apps), I simply did the 'reprov' trick and all has been just fine ever since.

Related, I had a similar issue of sorts when I was shipped a new SIM card. Cingular shipped me a new one and I installed it. After, GL started up, but nothing would sync into it. I called GL and they said that it was all tied together... the IMEI, the SIM, etc. According to GL, changing any single item (SIM, new Treo, etc) would cause it to stop wireless sync'ing. Their solution was to reprovision GL. However, like the instance above, they were adamant that I *must* do a hard reset first. The tech told me that simply re-provisioning wouldn't work... that he helped people with this all day, every day, and that the only way to get it working again was to start with a hard reset, then a fresh installation of GL. Well, he was WRONG! I wasn't about to hard reset, then re-install all my apps. So I did what I believed would work and it turns out I was right. First, I went into my GL Management Console and I deleted myself as a user. Then I stopped all GL services and deleted the cache file for my old user. I restarted the GL services and set myself up as a new user. I then did the OTA setup and all worked just like normal. I can only imagine how many people GL is telling to hard reset and that have to go through the re-install pains. I guess that tech support's answer of "do a hard reset" for Palms is similar to Window's tech support people forcing people to use their recovery CDs even when its an easily fixed issue.

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