Leopard Server does all of the things that Tiger Server did (see the review, "Tiger burns bright"), with modernization that's particularly visible in its default security and the GUI interfaces that operate it. You'll also find that often-used features like the setting up of network shares have been moved to top-level management interfaces. Leopard Server is a much easier OS to run even when your requirements exceed that which the desktop-like GUI can manage.

The Bottom Line Mac OS X 10.5 Server (Leopard Server) Apple, apple.com Excellent  8.8 criteria score weight Management 9 20% Performance 8 20% Scalability 7 20% Features 10 15% Security 10 15% Value 10 10% Cost: $499 for 10-user license; $999 for unlimited users; unlimited license bundled with Xserve Platforms: Intel Mac or PowerPC Mac with G4 or G5 CPU and 1GB of RAM (Intel Xserve Xeon, Mac Pro, or dual-socket PowerPC G5 recommended by reviewer) Bottom Line: Leopard Server is the definitive stand-alone server solution for SMBs and workgroups. It is genuinely a plug-and-go e-mail, blog, wiki, RSS, calendar, Web, directory/address book, and IM service package that looks fantastic, sticks tightly to open standards, and adapts to a range of admin skills from desktop user to Unix jock. Scaling beyond a two-machine fail-over cluster causes Leopard Server's implementation cost to rise sharply, making it most at home in a short rack. About our Reviews and Scoring Methodology

Just add users
Wiki, blog, calendar, and instant messaging are pulled together as Web services, and Apple took a brilliant approach. When you create a new user on Leopard Server -- of course, you can link to Windows Active Directory and arbitrary LDAP directories as well, with Leopard providing single sign-on -- Leopard Server sets up homes for the user's blog and calendar and shared address book ("Directory"). When you create a group, Leopard Server automatically wires that group's members into selected Web services, with configurable access by users outside the group. For example, the group gets its own Wiki and group mailing list, and a calendar that permits full-group invites. That's just a hint of the "do it in one place, it shows up everywhere" integration that's familiar to Mac client users. It is just as pervasive in Leopard Server.

It's clear that Apple let its creative and technical wizards run wild in Leopard Server just as they did in Leopard client, and as with Leopard client, I can't hope to run down the list of Leopard Server's new features. I can point to an example of Apple's assembly of its own technology to blow users' minds. Podcast Producer sounds like a desktop tool, but it's a major innovative leap in back-end services. Podcast Producer is server-side automation for podcast workflows. It takes media content uploaded by users, carries it through a workflow that includes grid-based media format transcoding, and posts it to a targeted podcast site, yours or Apple's (iTunes and iTunes U). Mac users running Leopard have an application called Podcast Capture that is the front-end for Leopard Server's Podcast Producer. Just record it, assemble other bits you want to take along, send it, and it magically appears in the right place in the right format; those are details that users no longer need to worry about. They can if they must, but the speed and quality of the automated approach -- this is one area where Leopard Server scales out of the box -- exceeds what most shops could do with custom code.

And that makes a fitting closing point. Below the datacenter level, where the expectation of serving millions of external users is wired into planning, there's often no reason for servers to be complicated beasts. Ideally, they should look no scarier to administrators than they do to users. There is no question that complexity is a show-stopper for small to medium businesses, independent professionals, and budget-limited organizations that really need to just dump an Xserve or Mac Pro in the most convenient spot, hook one cable to the LAN and one to the WAN, and go live with blogs, wikis, internally-hosted IM, and podcasts while taking care of the basics such as firewall, viruses, and spam. For that last garnish that finishes the dish, know that scalability is relative. An Xserve or Mac Pro with a hardware RAID adapter, or an outboard Xserve RAID, can handle more simultaneous users than you'd expect. Don't base your expectations on what Windows and Linux PCs can do. Leopard is a different beast that could easily be the only collaboration server that an organization of modest size requires.

Additional resources
Review: Mac OS X Leopard: A perfect 10
Apple's new operating system and its massive new feature set challenge users and developers to explore new and better ways of working
A developer's-eye view of Leopard, part I
Xray and Core Animation stand out among Apple's immense bag of new Leopard tricks
A developer's-eye view of Leopard, part II
Leopard's Xcode3.0 integrated development environment and Objective-C 2.0 language help define the Mac platform
A developer's-eye view of Leopard, part III
Cocoa and other sweet object-oriented frameworks magically make all Mac apps part of an integrated suite
A developer's-eye view of Leopard, part IV
64-bit Darwin, Dashcode, Time Machine, and Ruby on Rails call on developers to trade out established skills for new ones
Tom Yager: Enterprise Mac