In the upcoming Snow Leopard Server, it seems that Apple will be introducing a new feature called Mobile Access Server which would allow iPhone users an alternate way to access corporate resources and services.
Although it has been know for some time that Apple would be providing some sort of Remote Access features in Leopard Server, they were very vague in describing it as, "push notifications to mobile users outside your firewall" and "secure remote access to email, address book contacts, calendars and internal calendars." To those of us in the tech field, this sounds a lot like VPN, however if you recall, the iPhone has been capable of VPN access since the introduction of the iPhone OS 2.0.
This session, announced for the World Wide Developers Conference 2009, is a bit more intriguing. It talks about a service called Mobile Access Server, which will allow "a path through a corporate firewall for IMAP, SMTP, HTTP, and CalDAV without using VPN."
If this is an alternative to VPN and Microsoft-rolled solutions, Snow Leopard servers could add up to a huge amount of savings for corporate IT environments...For more details, AppleInsider has a more in-depth article.
