OS X Server offers an extremely simple system to manage account preferences, at least those user preferences predefined by Apple. Systems administrators, however, typically find themselves needing to control application settings that haven’t been singled out in Workgroup Manager.

If you’re responsible for more than a handful of Macintosh workstations, you can’t get away with running from desk to desk with a firewire drive anymore. IT departments are getting the call to do more with less, and consultants who still charge time-and-materials aren’t getting called at all. For years now, Apple has stressed the .pkg format for mass deployment of their own software. If you’re responsible for deploying third-party applications, on the other hand, the best tool on the market right now might just be JAMF Software’s Composer 7.

Backing up client machines to a specially-provisioned network share is one of the marquee features of Leopard Server. Unfortunately, it’s a feature with far more promise than documentation. When it works, it’s a dream, finally freeing you from an aging Retrospect setup (or worse). When it fails, though, it tends to do so without much insight as to what’s gone wrong. If you can’t get Time Machine backing up to a server, you’ll get plenty of detail as to why. Once a machine stops backing up properly, though, there’s no real indication as to how you might get it working again.