Hi all

sorry for the late reply to this post but I had not seen it at the time.

We, the "Tauranga based company" are TechnologyWise, very much alive in the middle of Tauranga and still strongly supporting and using Open Source solutions for our customers. If any of you come to Tauranga, please visit us in "Basestation", a co-working space in the middle of town. There is more Open Source happening with others here!

We had to start to move on from SMEserver a while ago and we are in the process of converting customers from formerly SMEserver to a different stack of (Linux and Open Source based) applications, deployed as Docker container stack - and the core components are Debian based. So for us the move away from CentOS (= Red Hat = IBM) started much earlier.

At the time that Microsoft was selling their "Small Business Server" product as on-premise server solution, SMEserver (formerly E-Smith) was the closest product to match its functionality at much lower cost and better stability. Personally I see it as an excellent product that very well integrates the Linux components behind a GUI for the every days admin. I.e. by creating a new user account through the GUI, it sets up the account across Samba, email server, FTP server (if enabled), etc. so it "hides" and avoids much of the technical complexity for most of the standard tasks.

We had to move on due to higher requirements for the Samba backend. We need to be able to offer an Active Directory backend (= Samba 4) where SMEserver is unfortunately still only Samba 3. The move from Samba 3 to 4 is such a huge step that the (too small) developer group of SMEserver understandably could not manage yet.

Michael

On 21/01/2021 14:55, Ian Stewart wrote: