WWDC Leopard Server Sneak Peek Highlights

Steve Jobs revealed a first glimpse of new Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard features in WWDC opening keynote address. There are additional details and movies illustrating Leopard and Leopard Server features on Apple's site. Here are some highlights and observations.

New Open Source Announcements

Open Source Product Manager Ernest Prabhakar announced a broad new initiative that includes buildable Intel kernel source. Thank you, and please note Tom Yager was as completely full of hot air as I had suggested. No vast conspiracy afoot, just a delay involved with rolling out Leopard and the Intel platform.

Prabhakar also announced a new, open calendar server under the Apache license, a direct blow to Microsoft Exchange Server. The iCal Server, along with Bonjour and Launchd will be supported in a new Mac OS X centric, open development website called Mac OS Forge.

Leopard Server feature overview

Apple showed off a highly simplified version of Server Admin tools. It appears that Workgroup Manager (for handling users) and Server Admin (for controlling services) have been merged into a simplified user interface borrowing from System Preferences.

It may also be that the new Server Preferences just offers a simplified version of the Admin Tools. Either way, it is now much easier for Mac savvy users to manage Server themselves, although its unlikely that Apple’s “no more IT department!” might be a overstated marketing line.

In any case, creating users and turning on services will work just like they do in the non-server version. This would sure pave a path to providing my Xserve mini!

Apple also demonstrated a simplified version of Server Manager (for hardware monitoring) as a dashboard widget. It shows available drive capacity, network throughput, service status, and users connected. The Leopard Server preview website also describes using Open Directory to automatically set up new machines with a standard set of applications and settings. No new small Xserve yet, but this pretty much captures my embedded version of Server, accessible to common users and super easy to set up.

The server presentations were less detailed than Leopard desktop features, but included an apparent replacement of the existing Blosjam weblog server with a new Wiki Server, with controls for visually creating Intranet web pages with integrated weblogs and shared calendars. Wow!

Apple pointedly describes their new, standards based iCal calendar server as a drop in replacement for Exchange Server, noting that Apple doesn't charge per-user access fees like Microsoft does. They advise users to get Xserves to run their calendar and use their existing Microsoft Active Directory setup for “user log-on and authentication.” Apple even throws in an extra "Windows is Legacy" dig by using the old Outlook icon next to Mozilla Songbird and iCal.

The Wiki Server integrates with calendar services as well, generating shared web calendars. The screen shot also suggests a new calendar popup date picker control for the Web Kit. No clues on what this wiki is based on, but it looks like something custom.

Apple describes updating content with mouse clicks rather than typing in Wikipedia style markup syntax. This looks like the delivery of Tim Berners-Lee’s two way web, where users not only browse, but edit. Wiki pages apparently also use RSS to notify updated content.

Spotlight Server tracks file permissions to allow users to search server shares, but only ones they have permissions to search. I thought this would be too difficult to deliver, but apparently not.

Also featured on the Leopard Server website is Podcast Producer, which ties video production and content delivery into Open Directory security as well as Xgrid distributed processing.

A new QuickTime Streaming Server 6, iChat Server, Apache, MySQL, and Mail services are all now 64-bit native. Apple will also ship Leopard Server with Ruby on Rails.

There are more notes on Leopard and Xcode features in the next article.

I really like to hear from readers. What do you think? Leave a comment or email me with your ideas.

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