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7月28日 Firefox Enterprise Working GroupI should have mentioned this before but got carried away with blogging about Web stuff!
I am participating in a really exciting venture. Mike Kaply of IBM and many Firefox improvements, has managed to seriously kick the whole enterprise market into gear by organising the Firefox Enterprise Working Group. This venture, which you can read more about here, has managed to bring together several people with experience of Firefox usage in the enterprise (and education). I much appreciated that Mike asked me to be involved and I give as much time as I can, gladly.
The great thing was that there were a number of really large companies contributing to the first conference call of the Working Group, indicating that a lot of people are serious about this. Equally important was that it had buy-in from people at Mozilla Corp on the call. Oh, and of course, we educational establishments are important too! I'm, personally, really excited at the prospects.
The first call was titled "Experiences" and was to give people the chance to express what happens in their organisation.
The first people to talk was "Team A" (obviously, a lot of people on the call need to keep anonymous because competitors are also in on the call). They are a massive company, a Fortune 100. Their contribution was really interesting and they have also uploaded a case study about their environment. Several interesting points made include that they use Mission Control for their configuration management. This surprised me because Mission Control is actually an ancient Netscape management tool from about 8-10 years ago tailored for Netscape 4. It doesn't surprise me that it works, given how much Netscape code runs through Firefox's veins, but interested to know how they came about to use that. At a guess, maybe they had it for Netscape 4 and several people are experts in it, or have even modified it over the years, and they've found it fits their needs for Firefox. As I understand it, the configuration management part actually works very similarly to the way FirefoxADM works - except it gets the prefs and lockPrefs from the LDAP-based Mission Control WebApp as opposed to the Policies part of the registry. It IS better than FirefoxADM, especially because you can update over the internet and can update on-the-fly, but personally, I prefer the group policy approach (though I obviously would seeing as I wrote FirefoxADM!). I'd like to thank the guys from Team A, because their experiences were really interesting, and got me thinking, especially with regard to how they deploy plugins as extensions.
I talked next. I'll say more in a post once I've uploaded my case study to the wiki - early next week hopefully if I get approval from my manager. What I will say is that apart from the nuances of education, such as the fact you can only really update major applications once a year during the summer, it surprised me how close my experiences were to Team A. Our deployment procedures are similar, if less formal. Oh, and whereas Team A have security teams signing off patches, and several core engineering teams involved in making sure Firefox and its plugins work, here its...well...me: I sign off patches, package Firefox, package all the extensions on all browsers and make sure of its readiness. However, the turnaround times are similar for minor and major updates.
Mike Kaply also talked about his experiences at IBM. He made some really good points about intranet applications and the fact that whilst compatibility with Firefox is becoming more and more of a common feature, for bought web services sometimes the compatibility is only added in, in a version beyond which you are using. Therefore, it becomes a case of persuading the business that Firefox compatibility is worth the cost of the upgrade. I think in an educational establishment, where there is more of a build not buy attitude, this is less of a case (and it helps when you have people like me badgering the Applications division for the compatibility!). At IBM they use, unsurprisingly, Kaply's Client Customization Kit mainly. So 3 organisations, 3 different approaches - I wonder what the others are doing?
There was a lot more talked about in the session, which Yuriy does a great job of describing here (excellent blog about Enterprise 2.0 too). Overall it was a really great first call and I came away really buoyed up about the possibilities of where this could go.
If you are reading my blog and are using Firefox in an enterprise environment, go to the wiki and post your experiences, post your thoughts or if you want, email me (address on the right there) with your experiences, issues and wishes and I'll do my best to raise these things. And if you can join in on the call or the IRC channel please do so - its really important that while we've got the ear of Mozilla Corp, we let them know what is wanted, needed and I really do believe that it could lead to Firefox becoming really big in the enterprise market. Exciting times ahead... 引用通告引用此项的网络日志
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