BES Express 5.0.3 & SBS 2011 Dispatcher Service will not start

I had one of our team install BES Express 5.0.3 onto a Small Business Server 2011 so that we could support all of five Blackberry users, so this should have been straight forward.  Well as is life it wasn't, it was the team members first BES install and after many hours of head scratching he came back to ask for an escalation.

I took a look and could see the issue was the Blackberry Dispatcher Service was stuck in in Starting mode.  This is never a good state for a service to be in so I knew it was likely that if we fixed this we fixed the issue.

Now BES uses SQL Server Express for its database and this had been installed on the SBS Server, but being SBS Server the SQL Server Browser Service was disabled.  The SQL Server Browser Service is required for Blackberry Administration Server (BAS) to operate.

So I enabled the service and hey presto, Blackberry Dispatcher Service now starts.  The BAS web page still did not load and I had to restart the Blackberry Administration Service - Native Code Container.

Once this restarted the BAS was available and we could get onto the task of adding the Blackberry handsets.