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On the surface, Apple's Snow Leopard Server feels like a $499 maintenance release, but underneath, there's much more - improved performance, more polish and new apps focused on collaboration and content sharing.
Apple's new installation routine for Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) improves upon Leopard's (Mac OS X 10.5) Easy and Advanced installation choices. With Snow Leopard, choices are clearer, and fresh installations usually make prudent default choices.
We easily installed the new Address Book Server, updated Mail, a new Mobile Access Server, WiKi service, an iCal(endaring) server, iChat server, filesharing and backup server (an update to Apple's Time Machine software). After the applications are installed, we had to configure service, users, groups, and the like on a fresh installation, but an upgrade from Leopard requires little settings work.
We were happy to find tough password policies available for user accounts, but not so pleased to find that the administrator password could be very weak by default.
The Address Book server app, which allows multiple computers to share contacts, is new. It joins with directory services (Apple's Open Directory, and Microsoft's Active Directory via open source Samba) rather than be an extension of Open Directory. Address Book is compatible with Zimbra open source e-mail, and is modeled after WebDAV, as an XML-based extension of the venerable vCard. It stores vCards outside of the directory service.
The Address Book server isn't backwards compatible with Leopard, because the protocol it's based on, CardDAV, didn't exist when Leopard was developed. Users can merge their contacts into the server easily enough -- if they're Snow Leopard users.
Apple adds a new service to Snow Leopard, the Mobile Access server. A "VPN-less" authenticated/encrypted entry method that's designed to sync iPhones, Mac clients, to their address books, mail, and other internal resources. Advanced connections can be completed through Apple's L2TP/IPSec-based (or old-fashioned PPTP) VPN connectivity.
Similarly, another new app, the iPhone...