IT Pro Verdict

For small medium businesses, Lion Server is a bargain-priced and easy to configure server operating system. For enterprises, it's not as clear cut given Apple's numerous odd design choices and lack of rack mountable hardware, but the Profile Manager alone may make it worth deploying a single Lion server in an otherwise Windows or Linux-dominated environment. Lion Server won't be suitable for everyone, but at this low price there's little to lose in trying it out for yourself.

By Ian Betteridge

published 3 August 2011

in Reviews

Small business? Enterprise?

For small business customers, the removal of these kinds of feature are unlikely to be noticed. And I think this illustrates exactly what Apple is attempting to do with Lion Server: create a robust, flexible server operating system that works out of the box for small businesses, taking away anything which might make configuration more complicated. Enterprise customers are expected to be able to handle more complex admin tasks via the command line.

For small business customers, the removal of these kinds of feature are unlikely to be noticed but occasionally it makes the life of enterprise admins more difficult.

This works for most things, but occasionally it makes the life of enterprise admins more difficult. For example, consider the simple process of accessing users' access rights to shares. You can't pick from a list of users; instead, you have to search for an individual user or group.

That's fine if you've only got a handful of users, but when you have over a thousand people with multiple nationalities, trying to ensure you've spelt a name correctly isn't easy. You might not know which group you need without scrolling though a list of them all. If your users and groups are in a third party directory such as Active Directory, you can browse the list of users and groups from within System Preferences - but not from within the Server app

Page 3 Next

Get the ITPro daily newsletter