One of the first major upgrades in services for Leopard Server is in the Spotlight service, which will preindex all server content -- including attached drives -- thus putting less of a load on the system when queried. More importantly, Spotlight Server will now respect access control lists so that when your users conduct searches on your storage-area network volume, they won't get any results that their permission levels prevent them from seeing.

There is also a Podcast Producer service that will allow an end user to remotely record audio and video via a workflow engine. This same engine does h.264 encoding and is Xgrid aware, allowing the production system to scale across many servers. And of course, there is an auto publish feature that will integrate with the other collaboration services.

Speaking of collaboration services, Leopard server will have the weblogs and mail available in the current OS X server operating system, plus they are adding a simpler listserver administration, a calendaring server and a wiki. There will also be support for mail clustering using an XSAN volume, something Apple has been unwilling to support in its current version.

The Calendar server, iCal server, supports the CalDAV standard and will integrate with Mozilla, GroupWise and Outlook. The wiki is based on Subversion and uses that back-end system with an Apple-written front end. This means the end user will not have to learn wiki tags and it will be driven by Asynchronous JavaScript and XML with drag-and-drop tagging.

The entire collaboration system will allow users and workgroups to easily post and share information. I'll cover the collaboration suite in detail in a later article.