Firefox - First Enterprise Working Group

Here is an interresting post entry. It deals with all the companies' needs in order to ease the deployment of Firefox. I think that many aspects are the same for deploying OOo in companies.

An explanation of the Firefox Enterprise Working Group (EWG) :

As I mentioned earlier, we now have an Enterprise Working Group that is exploring how we can make Firefox easier to use/deploy for large organizations (companies, schools, governments, universities).

A quotation of the issues companies have:

Very Brief Summary The theme of this meeting was "Experience". Folks on the call shared their personal experience with Firefox in an enterprise environment. There were clear areas of interest and overlap. My main take-away has been this: It cannot be understated nor unappreciated that "Enterprises" do, in fact, share pain-points and challenges and therefore must come together to form a real, effective Community. Some identified synergies By no means a completed list, but here is what jumped out at me:

• Packaging.
• Story around MSIs and MSTs vs some open source formats. Most Enterprises are heavy Windows users. At what point does the lack of these hinder adoption?
• What is feasible? What can Mozilla own and what can and should the Enterprise Community own?
• Patch Management.
• If an organization is not very Agile and agility assumes that not everything is perfect out of the box, is Mozilla's patch cycle too agile for "enterprises"?
• How are others patching Firefox on desktops without having to uninstall and install the entire product?
• Settings Management.
• What are some trade-offs between GPO and Mission Control?
• Not all settings are manageable.
• What settings should be exposed by all extensions to enable pref-level lockdown?
• Can we drive best practices for deploying plugins and extensions? There is very little documentation on where Plugins should go and how to configure in the registry.
• How do we prevent some critical settings from being "tattooed" into prefs.js? I.e. mcontrol and user agent settings should never be written to prefs.js when in Enterprise mode.
• User Profiles
• How can profiles/certificates be migrated with minimum impact to the end-users?
• Does having Firefox and IE share bookmarks help adoption? Can Firefox "piggy-back" on Favorites? How can it be done easily?

The links: http://jtbatson.blogspot.com/2007/07/first-enterprise-working-group-call.html http://e2pt0.blogspot.com/2007/07/firefox-ewgs-first-call-is-success.html

Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office 1.0

Did you heard of ODF? In short, it is the format used to store OpenOffice.org documents and it is standardized as an ISO format.

Yesterday, Sun just released the version 1.0 of his ODF plugin for Microsoft Office. This is a great news, it means that if you install this plugin, you will be able to open/save ODF files from Microsoft Office.

This works with Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Supported versions are Microsoft Office 2000, XP and 2003.

Congratulation to Sun.