A directory isn’t much good to anyone without any objects in it, so we’re going to create a few users and groups to test things out. As with creating a directory, there are a couple of different ways to do it.

In Server.app: Use the plus sign to add new users in the Users section - you can enter their full name, email address, and desired password here, which covers most of the account basics.

Directory accounts (as opposed to accounts local to your server) will appear with a circular blue globe icon next to their names.

Clicking the gear icon will allow you to edit the user’s properties (including the full name, email address, whether he or she can administer the server, and group membership - the user’s short name isn’t changeable after it’s set), as well as edit the services that user can use (making it easy to keep, say, mail or VPN access off-limits to guest users).

Editing a user

Controlling access to services

Under the Groups header, you can create and modify your groups and their memberships. If you’re running the Wiki or iChat services, you can make group-specific wikis and make group members appear automatically on each others’ buddy lists.

The second, more advanced way to edit users and groups is to use Workgroup Manager, another of the Server Admin Tools. Like Server Admin, this used to be the go-to tool for managing not just users and user groups, but also computers and computer groups - managing settings on a computer or computer group basis can be useful if you’ve got web kiosks or computer labs (for instance) that you want to act differently than standard workstations for users who log into them.

Start Workgroup Manager and authenticate using the Directory Administrator privileges you specified when you created your directory. The window you’ll see is a bit scarier than what you get in Server.app.

The four tabs above the left-hand column are for users, user groups, computers, and computer groups - if you made some users or user groups in Server.app before, they’ll show up here, too, and you can enter a lot more info in Workgroup Manager than in Server.app. There’s too much to go into in a general review, but this screenshot will give you an example of the detail you can go into:

The main thing you can do with Workgroup Manager that you can’t do with Server.app is manage OS X preferences - everything from the icons in the Dock to what applications your users are allowed to launch. If you select a user or group or other entry, you can click the Preferences button to see all of your options.

Settings in here are roughly analogous to those in System Preferences in any ol’ Mac.

Workgroup Manager is a powerful tool for managing users and settings, but like many of the other longtime OS X Server standbys, it’s on the road to being deprecated. The preferences managed in Workgroup Manager are mostly to be used for Macs running pre-Lion versions of OS X. Lion (and also iOS) clients are best managed with a tool new to Lion Server: Profile Manager.

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