Hello everybody,
I have many questions about using ZCS with zextras mobile and iphones with iOS 6. Further I need to know if it is secure enough to use EAS with SSL or if I better need a VPN.
This is what I am using at the moment:
Zimbra Collaboration Suite 8.0.3 with the zextras suite in 30 day trial mode. The most important feature for me on the zextras suite is the zextras mobile part to use exachnge functionality.
The E-Mail server is working and can send and recieve emails. I can connect my iPhone over WLAN with Exchange. Push mail is working as it should.
When I am using an OpenVPNconnect client on my iPhone and I am connected using 3G then I can use the Exchange functionality, too, but I do not get any push notifications. If I manually check my e-mail account I get the mails using VPN. I have noticed that the iOS seems to shut down the VPN connection when the phone is going to sleep. Are there any possibilities from zextras mobile to do a workaround for this? Same problem is with WLAN - if the iPhone is not connected to a power supply it disconnects WLAN after some time in sleep mode.
Probably zextras cannot do anything on that but I am just asking this to make sure that I did not miss any checkbox on the GUI 
So because there are the problems with disconnects on WLAN and VPN I am thinking about how secure it is if I open port 443 on my firewall directly to my zimbra server and connect my iPhone using 3G (without VPN) directly to my zimbra server on port 443 with SSL enabled. Is this a secure connection? Will all mails, contacts, calendars and so on be encrypted or is just the authentication/login encrypted?
Or will this only be a feature with newer versions of zextras mobile and the provisioning features?
And another question:
When going to the zextras mobile GUI I can see the connected devices but they all are using only EAS 2.5. I tried with an iPad2 with iOS 6.0.1, with iPhone and iOS 6.1 and 6.1.3 and with a Google Nexus 4 with Android 4.2.2. All are only using EAS 2.5. Shouldn't this be any higher version?
Puhh, that are many questions and probably not posted the best way but I hope you can help me on some understanding problems directly connected to zextras but on some other problems understanding EAS and so on, too. If I would find an easy and of course secure way to synchronize mails, contacts and calendar entries I am planning to buy some zextras mobile licences.
So thank you very much for your time and help.
I really appreciate it!
Greetings
Alex