When your users install M-Business Client software, they need to configure M-Business Connect so that it can access your server. For more information on M-Business Connect, see Installing M-Business Client with self-registration.

Provide your users with the necessary configuration settings by creating and distributing a .mal file. A .mal file specifies a configuration for an M-Business Connect-compliant server. When you double-click a .mal file, M-Business Connect starts up in the background and adds the configuration that is specified in the file. If you provide your users with a .mal file, they simply double-click the file, then Mobile Link adds the configuration.

For example, when users click the Configure Connection link in their M-Business Server personal pages, the server creates a .mal file, downloads it to the user’s desktop, and runs it. This way, your users rarely have to access M-Business Connect.

Note that a server configuration in M-Business Connect contains a username and password specific to each user. Thus, you cannot create one .mal file for all users. Instead, M-Business Server takes the username and password that the user logged into the server with, then uses those values to create the .mal file that M-Business Connect downloads to the user’s desktop.

A .mal file contains an XML 1.0 format specification with a single element named MALServer. The following is an example MALServer element:

<?xml version="1.0"?> 
    <MALServer hostname="sync.mycompany.com"
        port="80"
        username="janed"
        password="1234"
        passwordIsHashed="FALSE"
        passwordIsEncoded="FALSE"
        disabled="FALSE"
        friendlyName="M-Business Server"
        serverType="AvantGo"
        userUrl="http://www.avantgo.com/"
        serverUri="/sync"
        sendDeviceInfo="TRUE"
        hashPassword="TRUE"
        confirmation="Hooray! janed is now ready to connect!"
        confirmationcaption="Successfully added">
    </MALServer>

The following section describes the MALServer element’s attributes.