Hi all. I work for a small municipal government (appx. 50 employees) and have thought of centralizing our systems more (because they're currently a collection of independent PC's tied together with consumer-grade routers). I've been using Linux for at least 10 years for my personal desktop and have amassed quite a knowledge and familiarity with using the CLI.

Anyways, I've been wanting to implement an intranet server at the organization for a long time with the following features:

- ActiveDirectory or OpenLDAP (e.g. for remote logins)
- An intranet site
- Collaboration suite/mail server (e.g. Zimbra or Groupwise)
- Remote Assistance for clients
- Maybe other services such as OwnCloud/Seafile

Our machines are exclusively Windows PC's at the moment.

Honestly i'd prefer to use a LAMP stack set up on CentOS, BSD, or perhaps Debian, but the complexity of OpenLDAP and possibility of longer setup and maintenance time is a factor in my choice, and i'd just rather go with something easier to maintain since I can't dedicate full time to maintenance duties and may need to call in help if the server catches on fire (figuratively speaking) and LDAP/AD may become important down the line so that I can transition users over to using a domain server.

Just wondering if anyone has any recommendations on how to do this. Maybe a hybrid approach like having a web services server and a semi-dedicated AD server running 'windows based' services.

Personally I'm a firm believer in keeping things simple and easy to hand-over.

While you can go down the full open-source route for all of these things you will end up having to put the parts together yourself, while this can be great fun you'll soon come across some things that Windows just does better in an all Windows environment. For example "out the box" file sharing with Windows Server / AD allows all sorts of extended permissions / group permissions on files and shares that take extensions in Linux to implement.

I've not taken a look at the recent implementations of MS Small Business Server, but in the past it included the core things such as AD / file / print and also extended things like SharePoint for your intranet site (may be overkill though), and I think a version of Exchange is included.

The good thing about going down the all MS route is that there's a lot of people out there that have relevant MS certification and should be able to support what you're proposing. If you go down the open-source route then things get harder to get support other than via forums like LQ etc.

The good thing about going down the open-source route is that there's usually several things that will do the MS job and you can mix and match to your needs.

Depending on your security requirements you could also consider out-sourcing your mail etc. to something like Google Apps, I've recently done this for around 80 users and removing the headache of remote access from mobile devices and allowing certain departments to use Google Drive for collaboration internally and externally has also been positively received.

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Thank you for your more objective insight. I definitely want to avoid going an 'all MS route', though I don't particularly hate MS (I just don't think they provide the best solutions for everything and am wary of vendor lock-in). I've heard bad things about Sharepoint (though do want sharepoint-like functionality), and I don't really care for vendor lock-in in regards to what clients can use an exchange server. It may just be worth it, as you said to outsource mail/collaboration to another vendor and pay them a monthly fee which would be in the long run more cost-efficient than managing it locally and possibly having to call in external help, with the possibility of longer downtimes.

Moving a lot of things to dedicated cloud storage providers is an appealing option. Remote access is important and many of our employees need to access their files while off the premises. The problem is because we're a rural municipality, we don't have a huge bandwidth pipe (Perhaps 10Mbit down, 1Mbit up, currently) until fiber is installed in our area. Having inter-office sharing be done via a fast local cloud provider, and hooking it up to our domain name and routing it may be more practical than moving vast amount of files over our thin pipe would be.

I would also look into SUSE Enterprise Linux and Redhat Enterprise Linux

https://www.suse.com/products/server/

http://www.redhat.com/products/enterprise-linux/

both are designed for business
and will have everything you need

also both are NON FREE
as in you need to have a yearly support contract
( like for windows but without the NEW MS office rental fee nor the paid for AV software fee for the Microsoft anti virus software )

even if you DO go the Microsoft route
i would look into using LibreOffice or OpenOffice

Well, it's gotta be said: Office 365 is pretty crappy (validation/licence bugs and performance issues), but not sure i'd want to move everyone over to using LO or OO. I mean, they're kind of primitive compared to the more modern and sensical 'ribbon' paradigm that people are used to these days. Mind I last really tried LO/OO a few major versions back, not long after OO.o forked off into LibreOffice, but we currently still operate with MS Office document compatibility and interface familiarity being primary concerns.

I'll might look into RHEL or SUSE. I imagine they are more likely to make things more workable out of the box, and the higher ups here would be willing to pay for the extra features/polish especially compared to the potentially expensive CAL agreement that Microsoft wants for each user on the network for Windows Business Server.

for Active Directory
Novell works WITH Microsoft ( yes they went " to the dark side" )
and novell fully supports AD

redhat also dose
but novell works very closely with Microsoft

Small Business Server doesn't exist anymore, it is now Server 2012 Essentials. Essentials comes with a truckload of restrictions which are a well kept secret until you install it and try to deploy. Before you understand the MS licensing policies you have to take a course and an exam comparable to MSCE. Terminal server can't be used, and running AD and Terminal server on the same server is strongly discouraged by MS.

Then when you try to configure your server, just calculate double the time you normally would use because you have to get familiar with the tablet user interface and the giant program buttons. Don't expect anything in the usual place.

This having said, no one ever has been fired because he deployed MS, no matter how crappy the result is.

jlinkels

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Did some more research into it. I actually know a guy who runs a company that provides auxiliary tech support services to my company (he manages the mini-infrastructure of our accounting department which uses SBS inside of a Linux VM). I've spoken to the guy who works for us and he has mentioned that he typically deploys linux servers (CentOS) for small businesses because the cost for CALs is outrageous, Linux servers are more secure, and they're less demanding of system resources.

I've done my own research into OpenLDAP and am confident that we can pull this off. Between my linux knowledge (10 years or so of desktop linux with CLI, SSH, BASH) and his linux knowledge (Server deployment), as well as a redundant backup server/NAS, I think that we can handle problems that arise.

In the meantime, i'll look into how CentOS compares with the 'big enterprise boys' (SUSE and RHEL), but since we only have 30 machines on the network here, we don't need anything too powerful.

I wouldn't bother trying to pull all of this together on your own, when there is a project for doing just this.

http://www.zentyal.org/

Open source, free, winders compatible.

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Since Centos is a free rebuild of RHEL, they should compare pretty well