Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Server review

A server operating system that costs just £35 and is easy to configure must have a catch. Ian Betteridge ventures gingerly into the Lion's den to find out in our review.

Small business? Enterprise?

For small business customers, the removal of these kinds of feature are unlikely to be noticed. And I think this illustrates exactly what Apple is attempting to do with Lion Server: create a robust, flexible server operating system that works out of the box for small businesses, taking away anything which might make configuration more complicated. Enterprise customers are expected to be able to handle more complex admin tasks via the command line.

For small business customers, the removal of these kinds of feature are unlikely to be noticed but occasionally it makes the life of enterprise admins more difficult.

This works for most things, but occasionally it makes the life of enterprise admins more difficult. For example, consider the simple process of accessing users' access rights to shares. You can't pick from a list of users; instead, you have to search for an individual user or group.

That's fine if you've only got a handful of users, but when you have over a thousand people with multiple nationalities, trying to ensure you've spelt a name correctly isn't easy. You might not know which group you need without scrolling though a list of them all. If your users and groups are in a third party directory such as Active Directory, you can browse the list of users and groups from within System Preferences - but not from within the Server app