The last couple of days I have been reading “Managing iOS Devices with OS X Lion Server”. It is a fantastic ebook. Yes, and it is only available as ebook. No paper version.

Arek Dreyer has written all there is to know about managing iOS devices (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) with Profile Manager, a feature included in OS X Lion Server. Learn how to configure Profile Manager, access as a user and as administrator its web front end.

With this ebook you get a perfect introduction on how to use Profile Manager’stools to configure user settings for services such as Mail, Calendar, VPN, LDAP, Wi-Fi, and also important security settings to prevent unauthorized access to data stored on your users’ devices. If a device is lost or stolen, it tells you how the user and you, as an administrator, can remotely wipe the devices gone missing. The Profile Manager uses the Apple Push Notification Service (APNS), so you can immediately push configuration changes to your devices, as long as they have some kind of network connectivity. The ebook continues with more advanced setup of Profile Manager, showing you how you can organize both users and devices in to various groups with different kind of settings.

To sum it up in one sentence: This ebook will teach you how to configure your Lion Server to be an Open Directory master, use an appropriate SSL certificate, provide Profile Manager services, and perform basic troubleshooting.

The price is almost better than book, only $4.99 in iBooks and even lower on Kindle ($3.99). The ebook will soon also be available on peachpit.com.

iBooks store: http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/managing-ios-devices-os-x/id455014665

Kindle store: http://www.amazon.com/Managing-Devices-Lion-Server-ebook/dp/B005G2FSNG

Who is Arek Dreyer? So you are new to managing OS X? Arek has written several Apple-certified books, including “Mac OS X Server Essentials v10.6: A Guide to Using and Supporting Mac OS X Server v10.6″ and “Mac OS X Directory Services v10.6″. I recommend both books as mandatory read when they get updated for OS X Lion.