SME Server（最初叫作e-smith）由Joseph和Kim Morrison创立于1999年1月。同年4月公司推出了他们旗舰软件产品的首个版本——e-smith服务器及网关。到年底时，已经有数千的e-smith服务器运行在从斐济到芬兰的各个国家。关于e-smith的消息很快地流传在开发人员和系统集成人员中，而他们需要的正是面向小型企业用户的牢固易用的服务器。2001年7月，e-smith公司被Mitel Networks收购，2004年9月又被Lycoris收购，并且该项目目前还得到了Resource Strategies公司的赞助。

        Ian Wells has announced the availability of the fourth beta release of SME Server, a CentOS-based distribution for servers: "The SME Server development team is pleased to announce the release of SME Server 8.0 beta 4 which will be the next major release of SME Server. This release is based on CentOS 5.3 and all packages have been updated to the latest versions. Testers please note: CentOS 5 has dropped support for i586 and therefore SME Server 8 will not work on i586 hardware; upgrading from previous releases should only be done on clean machines. Issues with upgrading from clean SME machines can be reported in the bug tracker, but detailed reviews of upgrading paths will not start until release candidate versions are made available. Here is the release announcement with a full changelog. Download: smeserver-8.0beta4-i386.iso (615MB, MD5).（责任编辑：A6）