Server App

The Server app is a powerful new tool for managing Lion Server. It gives you control over managing users and groups and setting up key services such as file sharing, calendaring, instant messaging, mail, wikis, secure remote access, and backup settings for network clients — all in one place.

File Sharing

Whether you’re supporting a creative team, a distributed sales force, a class of students, or a small business or workgroup, your users need to share information to work effectively. Lion Server makes it easy to share folders and exchange files between Mac, iPad and PC users — as if they were using their own hard drives.

Mail Server

Lion Server is the ideal solution for small businesses and companies without an existing mail server. It allows you to bring email in-house, using your own domain name rather than relying on your ISP to host your email. Based entirely on open Internet standards, the Mail Server in Lion Server works with email clients on the Mac, iPad, iPhone and PC, and it supports push notifications for immediately notifying users when new mail messages arrive.

iCal Server

iCal Server is a full-featured, standards-based calendaring solution designed to make your life simpler by allowing people to easily share calendars, schedule meetings, book conference rooms, and coordinate events.

Address Book Server

Address Book Server keeps your business productive by sharing contacts and keeping them in sync on the Mac, iPad, and iPhone. You can set up shared accounts allowing contacts — such as a list of customers, suppliers, or employees — to be accessed and updated by multiple people in your organization.

Wiki Server

Lion Server makes it easy for groups to collaborate and communicate through their own wiki-powered website. Users can create and edit wikis and individual pages, tag and cross-reference material, upload files and images, and create tables and add comments. With the wiki accessible from a browser, team members can always be on the same page.

iChat Server

iChat Server brings the collaborative power of instant messaging to your organization. Now workgroups can transfer files securely, share a persistent chat room, conduct audio conferences, or with the iChat Theater feature in OS X, even broadcast a presentation, movie, or photo slideshow to other iChat users.

Profile Manager

Lion Server is ideal for schools and businesses that need to simplify deployment, configuration, and management of computers and devices in their organization.

Profile Manager delivers configuration-based profile setup and mobile device management for Mac computers running Lion and iOS devices such as iPad and iPhone. It simplifies the creation of user accounts for mail, calendar, contacts, and chat; enforcement of restrictions; PIN and password policies; system settings; and more. Profile Manager is integrated with the Apple Push Notification service so updated configurations, settings, and policies are sent over the air automatically.

Podcasting

Podcasts are ideal for distributing lectures, training a sales force, delivering product demos, or simply keeping employees, students, and customers up to date.

Web Server

Ideal for small businesses, Lion Server takes the complexity out of hosting and setting up a website — no webmaster experience required.

VPN Server

Virtual private network (VPN) access enables your offsite users to securely connect to your network and its services, while preventing access by unauthorized individuals.

Lion Server supports L2TP/IPSec and PPTP tunneling protocols to provide encryption and remote network access for your Mac computers, iPad and iPhone devices, and Windows PCs. These VPN services use highly secure authentication methods, including MS-CHAP and network-layer IPSec encryption.

UNIX

OS X Lion is built on a fully compliant UNIX foundation. This battle-tested core provides stability, performance, and security. And full UNIX conformance ensures compatibility with existing server and application software.

Designed for “headless” operation, Lion Server enables administrators to install and configure services without needing to connect a display to the server. Powerful remote administration tools allow secure service management from anywhere on the network or over the Internet, and support for SSH provides secure access from the UNIX command line. To keep critical services up and running, Lion Server has built-in tools for monitoring systems, preventing accidental shutdown, and recovering services quickly in case of network or power failure.

Open Directory

Open Directory is an easy-to-deploy directory and network authentication server that lets organizations benefit from centralized information. The Open Directory server is built around OpenLDAP — the most widely deployed open source LDAP server — to deliver directory services for Mac and mixed-platform environments.

LDAP provides a common language for directory access, enabling you to consolidate information from different platforms and define a single name space for all network resources.

A robust authentication authority using Kerberos Key Distribution Center (KDC) is built into Open Directory. Kerberos provides strong authentication with the convenience of single sign-on. So users need to authenticate only once, with a single user name and password pair, for access to a broad range of Kerberos-enabled network services.

Xsan

The Xsan file system is built into OS X Lion, allowing any Mac with appropriate connectivity to access an Xsan volume. Lion Server includes the Xsan Admin application for hosting and configuring Xsan volumes.

Networking

OS X Lion is built on open, industry-standard protocols and the latest in network security standards.

64-bit

OS X Lion is a full 64-bit operating system designed to maximize the computing potential of your Mac. Lion uses 64-bit kernel technology to support breakthrough amounts of RAM — up to a theoretical 16TB. With more RAM, server applications can utilize more physical memory and run faster and more efficiently. The 64-bit kernel dramatically increases the total number of simultaneous system processes, threads, and network connections the server can utilize.

OS X Lion supports 64-bit memory addressing, making it possible to run applications with data sets that require more than 4GB of memory.