Call on Sept 19th was about useful Extensions for the Enterprise. A larger portion of the meeting, however focused on the apparent dwindling interest in Enterprise Firefox within the larger community.
Is the Enterprise simply not ready to bring Firefox in-house? Or, are the majority of institutional adopters simply happy with a consumer product floating about?
Perhaps one of the problems is that we still talk about Firefox as a Web Browser as opposed to a "Productivity Platform" for the Desktop.
Firefox is a Productivity Platform
All the features that make Firefox a consumer favorite deal with productivity. Tabs, keywords, search bars, extensions, dictionaries, etc help us be effective and productive in our work and home lives. When consumer says "better usability", enterprise says "better productivity".
Mike Kaply spoke about adoption at IBM. Developers are finding ways to enhance the end-user experience by writing custom extensions for Firefox. Whether the extensions glue several applications together or simply automate the tedious process of filling out web-forms, end result is a boost to productivity.
If Firefox is the gateway or glue between what's on the Desktop and what's on the network, potential for productivity-boosting application is something to ponder.
Raising awareness
Mike and I are going to take lead on a few initiatives to help raise awareness on the Enterprise Firefox front:
- 10 Steps to adopting Firefox in the Enterprise -
Now that we've begun to pool experiences, we should be able to bake out a definitive guide of sorts for things to consider when bringing Firefox into an enterprise environment - Good Ol' Conference -
We will begin looking at opportunities to present at some Conferences - Blogging - check...
- Code Day and Training -
The learning curve for any kind of Mozilla-related development is rather high. Perhaps training targeting institutions and enterprises (like an Enterprise track) will help developers scale this wall. - Enterprise Firefox Incubator -
Talk has alway been cheap. As we address settings management, security, tools etc we will kick off projects within the Enterprise Working Group.
On my end, I'm going to kick off some projects for the Incubator. Specifically there has been interest in:
- Mission Control - how to get up and running, what the back-end implementation can look like and benefits over GPO
- Customized Reporter Extension - so that you can redirect Broken Website reports to a repository on your intranet
- Managed Security Zones for Firefox - how to configure and lock capabilitiy.policy settings in Firefox, how to create a "trusted" zone and fully leverage Web2.0 technologies within your trusted intranet.
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