Wiki Server finally comes of age
Apple's Wiki Server has finally matured as a central collaborative environment in Snow Leopard Server. Although it was a functional wiki and blog service before, the ability to have full access to a range of collaborative technologies -- including e-mail and shared calendaring in particular -- is a huge improvement. Access is through a Web interface. Wiki Server also serves as a functional wiki for projects and departments, and provides individual user blogs in a clean and generally easy-to-navigate interface.
A couple of specific points of improvement include enhanced search capability and integration with Apple's Quick Look. A technology that emerged on the Mac OS X desktop, Quick Look allows users to preview files without opening them or even needing an application capable of opening them.
The new Wiki Server includes Quick Look and functions largely like Quick Look does on the desktop. If a user attaches a file in any one of number of common formats -- including PDF, Microsoft Office and Apple's iWork and QuickTime -- all wiki users can preview the content without downloading it. This can be a great tool for tracking documents, viewing reference content and being sure what a document contains before downloading and working with it.
Easier Podcast Producer workflows
Another Leopard-introduced technology that has gotten an update is Podcast Producer. This is a way to create podcasts using Mac OS X Server. Podcast Producer allows an administrator to define completely automated workflows for users to generate podcasts.
In Snow Leopard Server, Podcast Producer has been updated and it now includes a new tool called Podcast Composer. Podcast Composer offers a quick and easy way to string together common operations needed between the step where a user records video and when it is made available as a podcast in one of varying formats. This can include things like copying the video to a server running Apples Xgrid clustering platform, formatting the video for specific devices, including company-specific watermarks or custom introductions and credits and generating the RSS feed for the completed podcast.
Much of the functionality in Podcast Producer existed in Leopard Server, but the interface for creating workflows has been dramatically transformed and simplified. It now resembles that of workflows that Mac users can create with the Automator tool and allows for quick and easy creation of multiple customized workflows.
