Snow Leopard For Enterprise
After Monday's Exchange-laden WWDC Keynote, it would be hard for even the most jaded critic to claim Apple isn't taking the enterprise market seriously. With all the excitement over the new Exchange-loving iPhone, though, there hasn't been a lot of fanfare over Apple's other big announcement June 9th. Shipping next year, "Snow Leopard" has been announced as the next generation version of OS X. With a press release that plays up performance and quality "rather than focusing on new features", it's easy to overlook just how many new features are really being promised, and how many of them are aimed squarely at large business.
The marquee item for most Mac users in enterprise is that Snow Leopard will feature "out-of-the-box" support for Exchange 2007 for it's Mail, iCal, and Address Book applications. It isn't a big surprise, given Exchange support on the iPhone, but this is a dream come true for anyone who's spent the last seven years battling Microsoft's Entourage. And while that's the only significant new functionality promised for the client version of the OS, it's the single feature that could very well drive the bulk of upgrades. Also included is Safari 4, with it's turbo-charged Javascript engine and the ability to cache and run web applications offline.
On the server side, Apple has announced a bevy of significant improvements. The second version of iCal Server will offer multi-user group calendars, as well as better invitation compatibility for Outlook users (a huge oversight in the original Leopard version). As a companion product, Address Book Server is a WebDAV-based system for vCard exchange, replacing Leopard's half-baked Directory application. Snow Leopard's Mail Server will feature server-side email rules and vacation messages, and combined with the announced "Apple Push Notification Service" for iPhone, OS X Server should finally provide unix-based push email. These features in combination could make the dream of a fully OS X-based communications infrastructure for Macintosh and Windows a reality.
The OS also includes long-awaited read and write support for Sun's ZFS file system (allowing for storage pooling, dynamic volume expansion, and "shadow copy"-style snapshots) and a 64-bit kernel allowing for massive amounts of memory addressing (16TB) and the ability to handle huge numbers of simultaneous network connections.
Taken individually, none of these improvements is earth-shattering, but each and every one is a solid step forward in areas critical to enterprise adoption. Right now the details are thin, and they're far from final, but Snow Leopard's focus and features make it alluring to anyone administering Mac OS X in a business environment.
Recommended Reading: For (very little) more official information on Snow Leopard, see Apple's client and server product pages. For more speculation, rumor, and innuendo, turn instead to TUAW (who proudly first broke the Snow Leopard story).
