10 good things about Snow Leopard for IT admins

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Macworld - While Apple didn’t promise much in the way of marquee features with Mac OS X 10.6, there are still plenty of under-the-hood changes and minor additions and enhancements in Snow Leopard to absorb. That’s especially true if you work in IT.

I’ve noticed a number of enhancements in OS X 10.6 that are of immediate use to me as a system admin. Some of these answer some long-standing requests IT types have had; others are just plain cool. Here’s a rundown of 10 Snow Leopard features that should improve the lives of Mac IT pros.

1. A decent Cisco VPN client

Anyone who has had to deal with the Cisco VPN client for Mac OS X is aware of just how bad an experience it is. It is functional, it works, but the interface for the client is simply awful. Even worse, you can’t close the window without shutting down the connection.

With Mac OS X 10.6, there’s a solid Cisco VPN client that you can set up with ease in the Network Preferences and access from the Mac OS X menu bar. So instead of this:

Snow Leopard gives you something that looks like this:

2. Automated creation of iChat Jabber accounts

Prior to Mac OS X 10.6, automating account setups for iChat—even just for Jabber setups—was pretty hacktacular, unless you had your Open Directory servers set up in a very specific way, aka “Workgroup Mode.” The problem with Workgroup Mode was that it didn’t work if you’d been running Open Directory in Mac OS X 10.4, or needed more features than Workgroup Mode provided. Even worse, while you can script a lot in iChat, you can’t script service/account creation. So really, a lot of sysadmins were left out in the cold here.

This changes with Snow Leopard. iChat has better Managed Preferences that let you have almost full control over Jabber accounts in iChat (though not for AIM or MobileMe, alas). So, with some quick setup time in Workgroup Manager, all your new users will have their iChat Jabber accounts set up and waiting for them.

3. Automated account creation for Mail

You could do the basics in Mac OS X 10.5, but Leopard left out a lot, like authentication mechanisms, SSL setup, and so on. In Mac OS X 10.6, you can take care of the critical IMAP and SMTP settings for an account. Unfortunately, you can’t do this for POP or Exchange 2007 accounts, but, it’s still better than it was. (There are some long-standing AppleScript bugs in Mail that made creating accounts via scripts far more interesting than it should have been.) Since this uses the same mechanism as the automated account setup for iChat (Managed Preferences in Workgroup Manager), it’s cake to set up.