Many of the services provided by OS X Server enable collaboration of one sort or another, but in this chapter of "Take Control of OS X Server," Charles Edge focuses on three types of collaboration: contact sharing, calendar sharing, and instant messaging, which map to the Contacts, Calendar, and Messages services in OS X Server.

If you want to share files among a family, class, or workgroup on an internal network, you’ll want to turn on file sharing in OS X Server. In this chapter, Charles Edge explains the different procotols available (AFP, SMB, and WebDAV) and how to create a shared folder, customize permissions, and connect to it from client machines.

Although DNS configuration beyond what you did in your initial setup isn’t absolutely necessary, it can be helpful for improved performance and easier access to internal servers. Read on for instructions.

After initial setup, the next step to take with OS X Server is to configure directory services, so you have your users and groups ready for when you enable other services in subsequent chapters.

This is the most important chapter in “Take Control of OS X Server,” because getting OS X Server properly installed and configured on a clean installation of OS X 10.9 Mavericks is essential for future reliability and stability. These instructions don’t always take the most obvious route because hard-won experience has shown that extra effort at the start can prevent significant troubles later on.

As the carpenter’s saying goes, “Measure twice, cut once.” Rarely is this more true than when planning to deploy a server. The more people who will access the shared resources of the server, the more the saying applies. In this chapter, Charles Edge explains what sort of hardware specs — in terms of storage, CPU power, RAM, and bandwidth — are necessary for your server, depending on what you want it to accomplish.

In this introduction to “Take Control of OS X Server,” author Charles Edge provides an overview of what you can expect in future chapters and where he’s coming from.

Cloud backup service Backblaze has conducted another study of hard drive reliability, this time pitting consumer-grade hard drives against the more expensive enterprise-level disks. Over the span of three years, 4.2 percent of the consumer drives failed, while the enterprise drives suffered a 4.6 percent failure rate. The caveats are that Backblaze tested 14,719 consumer-grade drives against 368 enterprise drives, and the two sets were used for different purposes. While more data is needed to compare longer-term reliability, Backblaze noted that longer warranties are the one clear advantage of enterprise drives.

The Mac continues to make inroads into the enterprise, with 66 percent of IT administrators in multi-platform businesses expecting to increase the number of Macs in their organizations in 2010. Read on for more details from the Enterprise Desktop Alliance's 2010 Survey.

As with the iPhone, the iPad's undeniable consumer appeal means that IT departments shouldn't be surprised when users start bringing them to work.

Rich Mogull explains how to configure your iPhone securely, and how to take advantage of the new hardware encryption in the iPhone 3GS.

ProVUE's Panorama database is already insanely fast (because all the data is kept in memory), easy to use (because you can always see all your data in a grid), and incredibly powerful (because it basically lets you wrap a GUI application around your data). So where can it go from here? Database sharing over the Internet, that's where!

Apple has all but ignored the enterprise market for year, with Steve Jobs famously declaring that if Apple made great products the enterprise would come to Apple. With the iPhone 2.0 software, Apple has changed its tune and implemented the kind of enterprise-specific features that large organizations expect in mobile devices.

Ever since the iPhone's arrival last June, corporate users have been champing at the bit for an opportunity to activate Apple's communications marvel on an enterprise plan; iPhones could only be activated by individuals. Finally, this week, AT&T announced enterprise data plans available to government, education, and business accounts.

Sun and Apple Eye Enterprise Market -- Apple and Sun announced last week that they intend to build a seamless bridge between Macintosh computers and Sun's high-end Solaris enterprise servers, in an effort to combine high-performance networking services with the Mac's multimedia and ease-of-use