Last week, in part one of this series, we took began deploying Portable Home Directories, reviewing their prerequisites and enabling the mobile managed preferences. This week we’ll continue the process, by setting up an AFP share to host our user homes and configuring our Open Directory accounts to take advantage of them.

Available since version 10.4, Portable Home Directories have become one of the most elegant and well-implemented features of a full Mac OS X Server deployment. Functioning much like Windows’ roaming profiles (or earlier Solaris NFS/NIS environments), they allow a user to log in from any computer on your network while retaining their personal data and settings. Unlike entirely network-based systems, however, they do so by synchronizing user data to the server (so that a full copy of the home directory exists in both locations), eliminating the need for constant connectivity.

In part three of this four-part series, we took a look at MX records, and how properly-configured DNS is essential for email hosting. In this final installment, we’ll take a look at ways to insure uninterrupted service and handle high volume for your corporate Macintosh-based email server.

In part two of this four-part series, you set up user accounts, storage restrictions, and authentication methods for new email hosting on an OS X server. This week, we’ll look at what it takes to bring your new mail server up smoothly on your internet domain.

In part one of this four-part series, we took a look at configuring basic email service on OS X Server, determining which domains we’d receive mail for, and what kind of messages we’d allow to get through. This week, you’ll decide whose mail you’ll accept (and distribute), how much of it you can reasonably store, and where to put it all.

Email has become the electronic life’s blood of a company, the primary means used to communicate with co-workers and customers alike. This makes the stability and dependability of your email system the foremost responsibility of any IT team. In this four-part series, we’ll take a look at the best ways to configure new mail service for businesses on OS X Server, and why you might consider other options.

In many business environments, instant messaging has replaced email (and even the telephone) as the tool of choice for brief and casual contact. While easy, real-time chat has been embraced by most users, it still poses a number of challenges for network administrators. Most message services use no encryption by default, run your private conversations through their own servers, and offer no means to retain a permanent record of what could be important business communications. Running your own iChat Server can solve those problems.

Advertised heavily and presented enticingly, every Macintosh user has heard that Time Machine takes the complexity out of backups. While that may be true for individual users, managing numerous backups over a network is still a significant challenge for most Macintosh administrators. So with all the attention paid to the Time Machine in Leopard client, there hasn’t been much focus on how Leopard Server can be used to back up multiple users to remote disks. In fact, if you’re not looking closely, the Time Machine features in OS X Server are easy to miss entirely.

One of the long-standing complaints from IT departments about Mac OS X is the lack of a granular administration system. Users are either administrators or they aren’t; It’s a simple and appealing set up for home studios, but a serious problem for companies laboring under HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley regulation. In our earlier series on how to master Open Directory, we deployed centrally managed network accounts for Macintosh. Administrators who need finer control of the user environment can build on that deployment to manage account preferences.

When most users think about remote access, what they ask for is VPN. For travel, telecommuting, and satellite offices, virtual private networks have been the defacto method of remote access for the better part of this decade. Though an assortment of VPN solutions are available for the Macintosh platform, many require third-party clients that may not keep pace with operating system changes, and while VPN is a complex system requiring a well-provisioned network, none is more easily configured the VPN service built in to Mac OS X Server.