Around 3 years ago @filippo_carletti sent this email to our old Mailing List, many things are changed since then but most of these aims are still true today.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/nethserver/QsfTqQTtB5w
NethServer Tribe!! Have a good day 
Thanks also to @davidep for the hint
During the last months, we (Nethesis) tried to build what we think could be a good SME-oriented distro:
NethServer
Our goals were:
- simple configuration
- quick trouble shooting
- fast development of new features
We think we can achieve those goals with:
- a new dynamic, streamlined user-interface
- standard components, tested widespread configurations
- minimal differences with upstream
We would like to attract developers and sysadmins, so we hope that having a common, well known environment would be a good start.
We use and like Smeserver, we think that templates and events are a great idea, so we retained them, along with the plain text configuration databases in NethServer. We built from scratch the new server-manager interface, in php. We rebuilt the mail server using postfix, amavis and dovecot.
We are still working on many featues and writing documentation for contribs developers, but we hope to have reached a point were an alpha release is good enough to have your opinion.
This alpha release is well tested but not ready for production environments.
NethServer is released under the GPL, development is open, developers are welcome.
You could find more informations on the website:
Please use the NethServer group for support requests, comments and questions:
https://groups.google.com/d/forum/nethserver
Thank you.
Filippo