The more I play with OS X server, the more I realize how much Apple tried to slap a GUI on open source stuff and was only moderately successful. Take for instance the WebDAV support. I can give access to a realm to various users and various groups. In my case, users have multiple short names, such as scottgruby and sgruby (I didn’t set this server up). If I give my user access to a DAV realm by dragging it over, OS X server only gives access to the first short name assigned to the user and then even lets me edit the name which makes no sense because if I change the name, I no longer have access to it. I had a user have trouble with this, because she was using the second short name and not the first. Furthermore, OS X server does weird things with the DAV permissions such that even if you have read only access to various parts of a DAV volume, you can’t browse it with a DAV client, i.e. the Finder or Transmit. Apple says this isn’t a bug, but I disagree. Clearly they setup the Apache access permissions incorrectly making it a pain for users to access parts of a DAV volume. So unlike an AFP volume where a user can mount the top level and navigate to directories that he/she has permissions to view, the DAV implementation requires users to mount the particular folder they want access.
I’m not a huge fan of AFP as it doesn’t appear to be the most efficient protocol, allows clients to hang around (using process load) and by default, isn’t secure. You can do AFP over SSH, but you still have to turn on AFP and explicitly tell it to use SSH.
There are some aspects of OS X server that are nice such as turning on the firewall and controlling access, but in my short time using it, I’ve run into a number of bugs (that I need to report) that I’m sure won’t get fixed.