Microsoft has dominated the small enterprise market with its out of the box feature rich SBS (Small Business Server). Linux has always trailed behind it and although most of the technology to rival Microsoft has been in place, it has always been a mammoth task to setup a server from scratch  to do that.  ClearOS came to fill in this gap.

“ClearOS is a powerful network and gateway server designed for small organizations and distributed environments.  Though ClearOS comes with an extensive list of features  and integrated services, the solution is easy to configure thanks to the intuitive web-based interface.” (extracted from Clear Foundation website)
 
Take a look at how ClearOS’ features match the MS SBS:

Microsoft SBS Centralized Authentication (Active Directory) Mail, calendaring and instant messaging (Exchange) Webserver (IIS) Firewall (ISA) Content management system (Sharepoint) Antivirus (Forefront) Database (MS-SQL Premium version only) Remote Desktop Services Virtual Private Network (VPN)

ClearOS Linux Centralized Authentication (LDAP) Primary Domain Controller (Samba) File and Print Services (Samba and CUPS) Mail (SMTP, POP, IMAP, Webmail) Calendaring (Kolab groupware) Webserver (Apache) Firewall plus intrusion protection (iptables, Snort) Antimalware (Clam Antivirus, Antiphishing, Antispyware) Antispam (Spamassassin) Database (MySQL) Virtual Private Network (IPSec, OpenVPN, PPTP) Web Proxy (Squid)

The Linux Magazine published an in depth article comparing and explaining this “new” Linux distro. 

Technorati Tags: Active Directory, Apache, ClearOS, CUPS, File sharing, gateway server, LDAP, Linux, Microsoft, network server, Samba, SBS, Server, Small Busines Server, Snort

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