SME Server wishlist

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Revision as of 11:33, 26 April 2013 by Larieu (talk | contribs)
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This page tries to catch all ideas and serves as a centralised overview of user submitted new or enhanced SME Server features suggestions.

Please note down your thoughts in a simple 1 liner. Further in depth discussions can be done on the devinfo mailinglist and the discussion mailing list.

This 'wishlist' is what it is, a list of wishes. Nothing more, nothing less. Which ones are 'in' or 'out' should be decided by the community on the mailing lists. All suggestions are about SME Server in general and not targeted specifically towards any one version of SME Server. A feature or suggestion that has been decided on to be included in a version will be logged in our Bug Tracker. Please join in.

Please append your name at end of your post. Thanks.


Must have

  • a governance of one or more persons as the debian way.....we need a leader (Stephdl) -> The Future of SME Server
  • publication of expenses and revenues to determine the needs and provide confidence how the money is spent .... with this I can know if I should give more (Stephdl).


Nice to have

Important.png Note:
SME 9.0 is just moving SME 8.0 onto a CentOS 6 base. No new features are planned.

SME 9.1 will be open for new features that have a credible development plan.
For now the current events and efforts are geared towards a transition from SME8 to SME9 'as is'


  • Webmail (Ian)
    • Decide if webmail is Core or Contrib
    • Investigate the webmail solutions available, and features such as activesync
    • Decide which webmail should be in core, if any
      • Zarafa oh yé Stephdl (talk)
      • Horde 5.x - would make the most sense as a direct upgrade to 8.x and has free sync to Outlook via Funambol (David Harper)
      • eGroupware It will be my choice --Larieu (talk) 03:35, 6 February 2013 (MST) - I think this is a good starting point to compare compare



  • Samba 4 (David Harper)
    • Decide whether Samba 4 is going to be production ready for the SME 9 dev cycle
    • Investigate the implications for the SME ecosystem of moving to Samba 4 (e.g. currently UNIX accounts are used for authentication but for Samba 4 all auth would have to be done through Active Directory - e.g. IMAP, webmail, VPN etc.)
    • Would likely require BIND 9 instead of dnsmasq


  • NFS server (David Harper)
    • Investigate ways of promulgating network-wide UNIX UID & GID - LDAP or AD based
    • Would allow for "roaming profile" like setups for clients like Ubuntu and CentOS Desktop


  • High Availability (HF)
    • Initial HA based on 2-node fail-over, active/standby cluster involving 2 SME Servers
    • Only supervised services are monitored and HA aware
    • Includes real-time replication of data between the 2 nodes (LAN/WAN Raid1 based on DRBD)
    • Proof of concept available


  • Cloud awareness (HF)
    • Market development and usage of services and software are changing quickly. One of them being 'Cloud' and all xaaS related services
    • Being able to deploy SME Server as a Virtual Machine (VPS) in ServerGateway mode with an ISP that only offers 1 Network interface
    • Patch available, Proof of concept applied on production servers Bug 7200
  • Delegation - into core (larieu)
    • Server roles - support by default for "split" servers
      • one approach is PDC + mail only + ftp only...
        • in this scenario if you declare server 2 mail only and you set on the primary mx.domain.tld remote x.x.x.x both must work in tandem as one
        • the main one should not keep any mail all related tasks to mail should be delegate to the second one, the second one should receive and maintain local backup user data from main one
      • another approach is PDC Main branch + backup PDC + branch server 1 + branch server 2 ....
        • in this scenario you have the main with HA backup + subdomain1.domain.tld should contain everything for your subdomain inclusive local authentication + mails of users (+ VPN s2s between master and subdomains - star scenario) but users data should be set only on main one, the server-manager on subdomain should have only local users
    • user role delegation - now you can achieve this by separate contrib
      • to be able to delegate user administration for group / domain /...
      • to be able to delegate ibay administration
      • to be able to delegate access to some panels
  • OpenVPN Bridge (Credit: Daniel)
    • OpenVPN_Bridge is a much wanted feature, and could be considered as a Core feature
    • Remote workers, home office, road-worriers is a very common way of working today
      • Bravo daniel openvpn-bridge+openvpn-s2s integrated as core system Stephdl (talk)
      • I subscribe also for any core developement which support openVPN client with devault user/passfrom LDAP Larieu (talk)
  • Git (Marco Hess)
    • Move the development of SME Server and SME Contribs to a more modern version controls system like Git instead of CVS.
    • Some work/investigation has already be done https://github.com/smeserver a few years ago.


  • Minimise Required Reboots (Marco Hess)
    • It would be nice if a contrib package on install (or upgrade) could flag that the full blown signal-event post-upgrade and signal-event reboot is not required.


  • chpst (wellsi)
    • Make a decision on chpst vs softlimit (runit rather than daemontools). See Bug 509


  • Re-ordered server configuration pages (HF)
    • Start with server role, then continue with existing order (POC available)
    • Add new server role 'Hosted virtual server'. If only 1 NIC present, a second dummy will be used, otherwise usual server/gateway mode (POC available)


  • 2 WAN + 2 LAN
    • 2 WAN - nowadays you have one terrestrial internet connection and for shure good plans from GSM company (Wireless one - but with ETH connection for the whole house) - why to not have

Idea's and suggestions

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