Why SME Server ?

Perhaps you’re thinking: “So what, I can do that with [your favourite distro here].” What makes SME server special is that its features are well integrated and that after the installation there is no need for end users to see the command line again. You can install it and forget about it. You can deploy it at client offices without worrying about having to telephonically help an end-user through the intricacies of tab-completion and the bash history. SME Server quietly and efficiently gets on with its work. Being a Linux operating system, one gets a lot of bang for their buck: A couple of years ago, I replaced a Windows 2003 Small Business Server running on a Pentium 4 that had a 1GB of RAM (RAM was expensive then, remember) with an old Celeron 1.1 Ghz with 192 MB of RAM for an office of about 20 users. The SME Server running on the old hardware outperformed the bigger server in every way. It had a boot time under of under two minutes, versus almost 10 minutes. Stability, easy backups and immunity to viruses were just some of the other benefits. That was a late 6-series SME Server. I’ve played with it off and on since then and continued to be impressed by it. The current release is 7.4, and improvements and additional flexibility are available as part of the installation: A screenshot tour of the installation is found here. Screenshots of the web-interface are included in the Administration Manual. The SME Server website at www.contribs.org is well worth spending some time on, visit the documentation section and read the FAQ to orientate yourself to the way SME Server runs, and to discover some useful HowTos including Asterisk VOIP server, vTiger CRM and eGroupware. Here’s a link to a more detailed feature list for SME Server. The only disadvantage of using SME Server that I have come across is that one cannot simply install standard RH or CentOS binaries due to changes to the system configuration as compared to standard CentOS. However, this is a small disadvantage and would rarely have an impact on users. The only alternative to SME Server that I know of is a recent project called “e-box” which is based on Ubuntu. It has a slicker looking web-interface that utilises ajax extensively to avoid full page refreshes. You can find it at www.ebox-platform.com. Perhaps we’ll have an article on that soon too. Or one could always “roll your own”, by installing Samba, MTA, LDAP, FTP, Apache, etc on one’s favourite distro, but using SME Server is so much simpler. Resources: * http://www.contribs.org * http://wiki.contribs.org/SME_Server:About * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SME_Server Andrew McIver works for a large ICT company in Midrand. He’s used Linux since Fedora Core 1, and currently switches between Kubuntu and openSUSE11.1