[Pc_Support] Re: Enterprise-level installation of Firefox & profiles?

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Tue, 2005-07-05 at 13:37 -0400, Damien McKenna wrote:
> Has anyone deployed Firefox in an enterprise setting?

The Mozilla suite and, more recently, Firefox browser are _officially_
_supported_ in (company name omitted) $30.5B (yes, billion) Integrated
Defense Systems (IDS) unit.

> I'm looking to do that at work (yes, along with OOo) and have a fe
> questions:
> * What is the current status with Firefox and roaming profiles?
> We're going to be using roaming profiles for our user accounts.
> The notes in bugzilla are a little confusing.

- Roaming Profiles

NT's Roaming Profiles are a PITA -- always have been, always will be.
The problem will not related to Mozilla/Firefox, but NT in general.
You have to know what you are doing, and even then, NT will rear-end
you in many cases.

There are ways to proliferate files across your network without using
the the "all-encompassing clusterfsck" of roaming profiles.  You can
setup different attributes in a user .DAT to reference different
_portions_ of a profile.  That's what I do, because I can't trust the
entire profile directory to be "roaming" -- at least NT5.0/2000 gives
you more "piecemeal" options (did I mention I hate how roaming profiles
work, and have since NT 3.51? ;-).

- Client Customization Kit (CCK)

In the case of (company name omitted) Shared Services Group (SSG), the
ones who handle the roll-out, they are using some version of the Client
Customization Kit from old Netscape 6/7.  I've been meaning to ask them
more details of this when I had time, but they are clearly doing it as
of Firefox 1.0.4.

When a user logs in the first time on a system, Firefox 1.0.4 sets up
all the details from their centralized Mozilla/Firefox configuration.
It solves the entire issue AFAICT, but I don't know what changes they've
made to it.

> Also, what's the best way to set defaults for configuration options,
> boomarks, etc?

Use the CCK, or something with a linage to it.  Again, I'm going to get
more info on what we're doing, but it looks like an XPI.

> Actually, I've just found
> http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox:1.5_Institutional_Deployment so anyone
> have any further experiences?

Here is the current 0.1 release of the CCK for FireFox 1.0.4.
I don't know if SSG is using that ...
  http://www.mozilla.org/projects/cck/firefox/  

-- 
Bryan J. Smith                                     b.j.smith at ieee.org 
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