Michael Kaply is starting a new series on the use of Mozilla's Firefox as enterprise software. In Part 1 he discusses the obstacles for Firefox to to be adopted in the enterprise.
As Firefox gains marketshare, there comes a point where increasing that marketshare depends on the adoption of Firefox in large enterprises. This article investigates what type of issues arise when supporting Firefox in a large enterprise, and what can be done to solve those issues.
The primary areas I will address are:
- Release Lifecycle
- Service and Support
- Business Value
- Third Party Applications
- Intranet Applications
- Deployment issues
In my own organization we have used Netscape/Mozilla products for years especially on the e-mail client side (with Thunderbird currently on every desktop in the office). However, in today's enterprise environment you need something more than just a good browser or e-mail client on your people's desktop. IT needs to be able to control, secure, and deploy software much more easily then what Seamonkey, Thunderbird, and Firefox currently provide. Originally, I had hoped that Mozilla would make better use of the Microsoft Installer (.MSI) and deliver better integration with the Windows Active Directory/Group Policy scheme but such features and abilities never really seemed to surface.