What it does (new in 1.6.1) is this:
GET (using HTTP,
not HTTP
S) to:
http://autodiscover.company.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.xmlNo authentication (login / password) at this point.
The server is supposed to do a redirect (HTTP code 301 or 302) to your real autodiscover server, and this has to be an https:// URL.
At this point, the app would execute an HTTP
S POST, now WITH authentication, to:
https://your.real.autodiscover.server.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml( e.g. for an Office 365 account using a custom domain, this would be something like s-autodiscover.outlook.com )
And now finally this should return the actual server settings.
That's in MS documentation, maybe there are more autodiscover methods, but this one is very popular (used by Office 365 and Amazon Work Mail both).
So no, it should not be necessary to run your actual EWS server under autodiscover.company.com.