You can use it as a front end for any company’s Web and e-mail server. This isn’t just for connecting to Apple servers, though. True, you can set up all those services with SSL, and connect securely, but this provides you with a layer between critical servers, like your e-mail server and the public Internet, always a good idea. Users can then connect, securely, to those servers without having to start up a separate VPN client first. You set it up to provide access to Web pages, e-mail servers, CalDAV servers, Address Book server, and the like. According to Apple, Mobile Access Server is a reverse SSL proxy, a.k.a. Mobile Access Server is a way to provide secure access to common internal services like Web, e-mail, calendaring and contacts, without having to set up full VPN access or create multiple VPN profiles. According to Apple, there aren’t any public APIs for those looking to base custom in-house solutions that use Address Book server.Ī feature that isn’t as client-dependent as Address Book Server is the Mobile Access Server, also new in Mac OS X 10.6 Server. If Macs are in the minority on your network, or you aren’t moving to Mac OS X 10.6 soon, Address Book Server is less enticing. Even years later, CalDAV support is still missing from Outlook–the biggest groupware client on the planet–and the state of many other CalDAV clients, like Sunbird is not good for non-technical users.Īddress Book Server is a big win if you’re in an shop that’s all or mostly Mac, and you’re going to move to Mac OS X 10.6 in a short timeframe. The downside to this is the same downside that greeted iCal Server/CalDAV when Leopard was released: outside of Apple, support for this standard is spotty at best. Since CardDAV is based on WebDAV, providing secure access outside of a company firewall is no harder than securing any HTTP-based service, and by acting as a limited-access front end to your LDAP store, Address Book Server helps you keep your LDAP data safer from prying eyes. Address Book Server implements CardDAV in front of Open Directory, so that users can create their own server-side contacts that exist outside of their local Mac, and can be used by Mail, iCal, etc. Just like CalDAV is a set of iCal-specific extensions to the WebDAV standard to make group calendaring easier without being tied to a specific vendor (a la Exchange or Notes), CardDAV hopes to do the same thing for Contacts. To deal with this, Apple has Address Book Server, which is based on the CardDAV IETF Draft. It’s tedious to properly secure LDAP implementations so that only those who should be modifying it and it’s terribly easy to make a mistake that affects the entire directory. But it was not designed to have hundreds or thousands of users modifying it throughout the day. It’s really good at letting you look up and get information from even a huge number of records in a hurry. While LDAP is great for a “master” contact list (a global address list in Microsoft-ese), if you want to allow people to make custom networked address books, or shared networked address books, it gets squishy. But LDAP is really not suited for the kinds of things a lot of companies want to do nowadays. Mac OS X Server has had a global contact list for some time now, thanks to the LDAP back end for its Open Directory service. There are some minor issues that keep it from being outstanding, but those issues won’t affect everyone.Īddress Book Server is a new way of dealing with the problem that networked contacts can create. Apple has added quite a few brand new features that move this from an OK upgrade to an excellent one. If Apple had only cut the price in half, and kept the core OS improvements for Mac OS X 10.6 Server, it would be an OK upgrade. Along with simplifying the options for Server, Apple cut the price in half, from $999 for Unlimited to $499. You want Mac OS X 10.6 Server, you get Unlimited. So no more odd simultaneous access limitations on some file sharing and other services. The ten-client version is gone, and now there is one option: Unlimited. While not perhaps as dirt cheap as Mac OS X 10.6’s $29 upgrade pricing, Apple has both simplified your options for Mac OS X 10.6 Server, and cut the price. Oh, and like Mac OS X 10.6, Mac OS X 10.6 Server is Intel-only. The latest version of Apple’s server OS boasts rather a lot of changes, designed to help boost Server’s attractiveness in the small-to-medium business, (SMB) market. Mac OS X 10.6 ( ) is a tuning of the operating system, removing older cruft, but not really adding new features to the OS other than some plumbing upgrades and Exchange 2007 support.
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