First Global Firefox EWG Call

First call was held on Wednesday, July 25 at 10:00am Pacific, 1:00pm Eastern, 17:00 UTC. Here’s the meeting details:

• 650-903-0800 or 650-215-1282 x91 Conf# 280 (US/INTL)
• 1-800-707-2533 (pin 369) Conf# 280 (US)
• IRC - irc.mozilla.org - #ewg

Agenda

Theme is “Experience”. We are hoping to get people to talk about what their experiences have been so far, not just with deploying Firefox but with communication around Firefox within their organization, including convincing people that it’s important.

"Official", Consolidated Notes

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?

Follow-ups

Attendees were asked to contribute content to the http://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise wiki. Content will be refactored as we overflow. Mike and I will put up a page for each Meeting where we can post and track agendas, follow-ups etc and will work to keep content organized.

Meeting Notes from Blogs

• Yuriy Krylov's notes ; dead link; "Sorry, the blog you were looking for does not exist. However, the name e2pt0 is available to register!"