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It’s known that in many cases, the services used by Apple were “officially-supported” open source projects, and the versions found in macOS Server often lagged badly behind the open source versions. That’s a good question! Sadly, there’s no real answer available from the company. These services are the “meat” of macOS Server, and they’ll be gone in a future release: Looking at the services that are disappearing, it’s obvious that macOS Server will no longer provide the majority of services that most administrators use it for. However, it goes on to say that “ These deprecated services will be removed in a future release of macOS Server, so those depending on them should consider alternatives, including hosted services.” The document goes on to say that if you’ve already configured one of the services, you’ll still be able to use it after the spring 2018 macOS Server update. A number of services will be deprecated, and will be hidden on new installations of an update to macOS Server coming in spring 2018.” As a result, some changes are coming in how Server works. A recent support document from Apple notes that “macOS Server is changing to focus more on management of computers, devices, and storage on your network. Little did we know at the time that Apple was preparing to remove the majority of those services. Last summer, the Rocket Yard ran a 7-part series on macOS Server and how it could be used to provide a variety of services - calendar, contacts, mail, messages and so on - to small businesses or individuals.
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