iPhone - FutureTG.com

You can access your company’s Sharepoint sites, too. That’s a Microsoft documentcollaboration
feature that’s also a common part of corporate online life.
The iPhone’s browser can access these sites; it can also open Word, Excel,
PowerPoint, and PDF documents that you find there. Handy indeed!
Virtual Private Networking (VPN)
The typical corporate network is guarded by a team of steely-eyed administrators
for whom Job Number One is preventing access by unauthorized
visitors. They perform this job primarily with the aid of a super-secure firewall
that seals off the company’s network from the Internet.
So how can you tap into the network from the road? Only one solution is
both secure and cheap: the Virtual Private Network, or VPN. Running a VPN
lets you create a super-secure “tunnel” from your iPhone, across the Internet,
and straight into your corporate network. All data passing through this tunnel
is heavily encrypted. To the Internet eavesdropper, it looks like so much
undecipherable gobbledygook.
VPN is, however, a corporate tool, run by corporate nerds. Your company’s
tech staff can tell you whether or not there’s a VPN server set up for you to
use.
If they do have one, then you’ll need to know the type of server it is. The
iPhone can connect to VPN servers that speak PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunneling
Protocol) and L2TP/IPSec (Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol over the IP Security
Protocol), both relatives of the PPP language spoken by modems. Most corporate
VPN servers work with at least one of these protocols.
iPhone 2.0 can also connect to Cisco servers, which are among the most popular
systems in corporate America.
To set up your VPN connection, visit SettingsÆGeneralÆNetworkÆVPN. Tap
the On/Off switch to make the VPN configuration screen pop up. Tap L2TP,
PPTP, or IPSec (that’s the Cisco one), depending on which kind of server your
company uses. (Ask the network administrator.)
The most critical bits of information to fill in are these:
Server. • The Internet address of your VPN server (for example, vpn.ferretsr-us.com).
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Chapter 15