Before I give my comments about this subject, I would like to apologise to the Nethserver team (and any other people that have been following my previous posts) about my absence from this forum. A little over two weeks ago, I was asked to give me opinion on this subject and due to having a busy scheduled, I have only just found some time to reply.
Anyway, after reading the above comments, I have got to agree with both a4rgl (Rich Lawrence) and Hunv (Kristian), Nethserver is a good toolbox for users that have minimal experience of administration Linux / Unix / Posix servers and that NS has a good range of tools that allows the user to setup firewall, mail servers, LAMP based web servers etc. with relative ease.
Whist Nethserver is suitable for most SOHO (small office / home office) and SMEs (small / medium sized enterprises), I have a few concerns about the ability of this project when considering about other user requirements and the ability for NS to be scaled up, as well as to be able to use NS within larger infrastructures, these issues include the lack of ability to change from recursive caching DNS to a authoritative DNS (from within the admin UI), the lack of being able to define extra partitions / storage devices (with the exception of USB devices and network storage) for backups and file storage, the lack of a module to define the users own CA certificates, the ability for the user to define cronjobs (from the UI) and (to a lesser degree) the slightly out-dated look of the administration interface. I also have a slight issue with the amount of choice when choosing a suitable groupware infrastructure (at the moment there is a choice of 3 projects depending on the users needs â OwnCloud, Webtop and SoGo, whilst I understand that choice is usually a good idea, would it not be wise to have a single platform that would allow for a level of consistence?)
Apart from the above issues, as stated, NS can be used to replace existing server infrastructure, including the ability to replace existing MS Windows servers (I use NS as a replacement for Active directory / Windows authentication) but would also like to see a cleaner usage of LDAP administration (as well as a simple method of being able to use a master / slave LDAP connector), I also would like some sort of MySQL / Postgress admin interface (similar functionality to that available within PHPMyAdmin / PHPPGAdmin).
I agree with a4rgl, I would also like to see an inclusion of some customer relationship management / business intelligent software (SugarCRM?), as well as a web based project management solution (eg. Libreplan or Redmine)
I would love to know other users thoughts / experiences about the above issues / comments.
(I now have a bit more time to focus my attention on this and other projects, so if any of the NS team has any ideas that I can contribute to, please leave me a message, I will do my best to aid and support this project).