One of the biggest announcements from Apple with OS X Mavericks was not part of the WWDC 2013 keynote. Instead, it is buried deep in a technical document on Apple’s site. This is the announcement that the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) is being deprecated in favor of Server Message Block version 2 (SMB2).
While this announcement may not mean very much to general consumers, it is certainly going to be a large change for those who integrate Macs in enterprise environments. SMB2, also known as CIFS, is the main file sharing protocol for Microsoft Windows, and also has excellent support on Linux through Samba.
Apple has long supported SMB in some form on OS X, but as it was not the default, it did not receive the love and care that AFP did. In the past, Apple simply used the open-source Samba project to gain this functionality, and there was much outcry from many Mac admins...
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