Leopard and Leopard Server: Mac OS X 10.5 is Coming

Get a glimpse of the not-so-distant future

Did you hear about the cool features in Mac OS X 10.5 last week? Neither did we.  Come to think of it, we haven’t heard anything about Apple’s latest operating system, christened “Leopard” since the World Wide Developer’s Conference in August 2006!  Steven promised us “Spring 2007” at that time, so there’s no way we can be bitter…or at least no legitimate way.  Spring begins late this month and ends in late June, believe it or not.  That stands to reason that the latest version of this mature OS will be released during Q2 of this calendar year.

A trip to http://www.apple.com/macosx/ will direct you to a sneak peak of Leopard, touting its top ten best features. We’ll focus on a few, but move swiftly on to Mac OS X Server, as it has much more to do with business needs than just the desktop OS.

Desktop OS Capabilities

• Time Machine: Apple already has Backup, but has gone one better with Time Machine. Initially it makes one complete backup of your system (on an external drive or network sharepoint) and then periodically backs up files that have changed. You can retrieve past versions of files or files you’ve recently deleted by zooming your window back through time just like the name suggests.
  
  
• Spotlight: (taken from Apple’s site)
  “More haystacks? No problem. Spotlight for Leopard finds what you’re looking for on other Macs, including servers running Mac OS X Leopard Server. Just set up your remote Macs for file sharing and Spotlight includes results from those machines in your search. That’s one-stop searching on any Leopard machine with access to your network…
  
  ... In Leopard, Spotlight provides a richer syntax so you can search for more specific sets of things. Use new boolean logic to narrow search results by entering “AND,” “OR,” and “NOT” into a search request. You can also search using specific file attributes — author, type, or keyword, for example…”
  
  
• Spaces: Take your desktop and cadre of constantly running applications to task, and organize it. It can be pretty busy, even with Exposé to organize things. Spaces allows you to divide your running applications and items into multiple desktops; a “web” space for your browser(s), HTML authoring apps, a “creative” space for iLife and iWork, etc. The names we’ve suggested here are just that- suggestions. Your limits are your own.
  
  
• Dashboard: Perhaps one of the coolest things about dashboard in Mac OS X 10.5 is “Web clip” , which allows you to take a section of a web page and turn it into a widget all it’s own, no coding required. You really just need to see the demo of this to get how cool this is.

Server OS Capabilities

Mac OS X Server 10.5 is Apple’s sixth release of its Mac OS X Server operating system in as many years. Leopard server brings to the table a few anticipated features, as well as a couple of unexpected ones:

• iCal Server: is based on the CalDAV standard, a conglomoration of existing standards allowing cross-platform calendaring, free-busy checking, and full Open Directory integration -- that's close to an SBS-killer.
  
  
• Teams Directory: is Apple’s catch phrase for its built-in Wiki Server, taking their previous attempt at a blog-server (based on blojsom) one step further.
  
  
• Spotlight Server: adds Apple’s incredibly-fast content and meta-data search engine capability to mounted volumes, allowing for lightning-fast searches across your company’s gigabytes (or terabytes?) of shared storage. Think about the plug-in possibilities to create a shared asset server…

Also in the rumor mill is that the NSA is revising its security paper on Mac OS X 10.3 to accommodate Mac OS X 10.5.

Look for your Apple-Certified All Covered consultants at the launch events at various Apple Stores on launch day (TBA of course). Ask us for a “Mac-readiness” assessment of your network to see how you can take advantage of Leopard's incredible feature set!

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