Centralized management.

Workgroup Manager simplifies system administration by providing centralized directory-based management of users, groups, and computers across your organization. For example, you can create standardized desktop configurations, set preferences, and establish password policies, as well as control access to hardware, software, and network resources.

For security-conscious environments, you can use Workgroup Manager to prevent users from burning media, mounting external hard drives, or running unauthorized applications. It also works with portable computers ensuring settings, configurations, and policies are maintained even when users are disconnected from the network.

Software update server.

By deploying a software update server, administrators can control how and when client computers download software, enabling access to approved software updates only. As the administrator, you now have time to evaluate and test software updates before deploying them throughout your organization.

At the same time, having a local caching software update server streamlines network use, saving the costs of multiple downloads of the same update and reducing unnecessary bandwidth consumption. By eliminating the need for each Mac OS X system to engage in multiple separate downloads for each software update, bandwidth charges (which add up quickly in large organizations) are reduced.

Starting up with NetBoot.

The NetBoot service in Mac OS X Server enables multiple Mac systems to boot from a single server-based disk image, instead of from their internal hard drive. This allows you to create a standard configuration and use it on all of the desktop systems in a department or classroom — or host multiple images customized for different workgroups. You can even create server configurations and run all of your servers from one image. Updating the disk image on the NetBoot server updates all of these systems automatically the next time they restart. In addition, you can copy a directory server configuration to all clients using the same system image. For security-conscious organizations, NetBoot permits Mac computers to boot “disklessly” — without having to read from or write to the computer’s local drive.