A power user’s guide to OS X Server, Mavericks edition

A power user’s guide to OS X Server, Mavericks edition

Dec 10th 2013, 14:00, by Andrew Cunningham

Mavericks runs version 3.0 of Server.app, the user-friendly face of OS X Server.

Andrew Cunningham

The Mountain Lion version of OS X Server marked the end of a transition for Apple's server software. When Apple released OS X 10.6 in 2009, Server was an expensive and entirely separate version of OS X that only shipped on Apple's rack-mountable XServe systems and cost $1,000 if you wanted to run it on any of your other Macs. Fast-forward to 2012 and the XServe was long-dead, OS X Server was a $20 add-on to OS X, and the powerful-but-complex tools used to manage and configure the server software had been thrown out in favor of a greatly simplified application primarily controlled via big on/off switches. It took a couple of years, but Apple had done the same thing to its server hardware and software that it did to Final Cut Pro. The company made its features more accessible for small businesses and high-end consumers at the expense of features important to a subset of professional users.
The Mavericks version of OS X Server ushers in no such sweeping changes. In fact, the scope of the update is closer to the incremental updates that the Mountain Lion version has received between its launch in July of 2012 and now. Despite a version number increase from 2.X to 3.X, OS X Server is finished with the major overhauls. The software has been changed from an enterprise-targeted package to one better suited to power users and small businesses. Now that the transition is complete, it's clear that slow, steady improvement is the new normal.
This means there's a little less truly new ground to cover than there was last year, but in keeping with last year’s review, we’re still going to go through all of the services OS X Server offers item by item. This will serve as both an evaluation of those services as well as a basic how-to guide for those who are new to the software—in cases where nothing has changed, we have re-used portions of last year's review. If you'd like to read more about OS X Server's transition from an enterprise product to a "prosumer" product, that's background information that we covered last year.