Snow Leopard™ Server

Chapter 32. Mobile Access Server

In This Chapter

• Introduction to Mobile Access Server

• Planning for Mobile Access services

• Mobile Access Server setup and configuration

• Managing and monitoring Mobile Access Server

Mobile Access is a new feature of Snow Leopard Server designed to enable companies to expose email and web-based services, including access to CalDAV iCal Server and CardDAV Address Book Server, to outside mobile users securely and with minimal client configuration.

Granting remote access to corporate email and messaging services has typically required a VPN connection, which creates a secure tunnel across the Internet and through a firewall to allow authenticated outside users to check email, work with their calendars, and access other corporate information services.

The downside to requiring VPN access is that users have to deal with increased complexity and are forced to manually establish a secure connection every time they want to access internal resources.

The problem is even worse for mobile device users, who are regularly transitioning between Wi-Fi and mobile networks that may not support certain VPN configurations.

In contrast to setting up a general-purpose VPN connection, Mobile Access enables email and web services to use standard TLS encryption to access internal servers with the same level of security that banks use to secure their online transactions.

This results in mobile devices being able to access private data without making any security compromises in the name ...