The Firefox Enterprise Issue Hits the Media

In the last week, I did an email interview with Computerworld magazine, regarding Firefox and FirefoxADM.

You can read the resulting article here.

So, what do I think of the final article?  Well, its pretty much spot on for the situation as it is.  I have to say, I gave them a lot more information than they used from me, which is kinda annoying.  But expected, really, in that they wanted to make a readable article.

The article’s writer, Eric Lai, did a good job of including the opinions of most of the people who should have been asked:  Mike Kaply, Eric from Frontmotion, Rafael Ebron (who did a great job of spreading word of our third party tools) and, dare I be arrogant to say, myself.  I absolutely agree with what Mike, Eric and Rafael say in the article.

The article, though, unfortunately exposes the real problem with Firefox in the enterprise:  Mozilla.  Chris Hofmann from Mozilla gave some comments and they are ridiculous and FUD.  From the article:

He dismissed Active Directory as a “proprietary technology” that would hurt rather than help Firefox administrators.

“Multiple levels of permissions applied across different groups add a lot of complexity,” he said. “If you look at the track record for that feature, it’s resulted in less security for IE.”

This is rubbish.  Complete and absolute rubbish.  In fact, when he says “multiple levels of permissions”, I’m not actually sure he even knows what the hell he’s even talking about.  And this is the guy Mozilla put in charge of Enterprise strategy.  Heaven help us!

All of this has made me come to a decision.  I am going to start to look at sourceforge, the emails I’ve had over the past 3 years, looking at Firefox to see anything I’ve missed and am going to draw up a list of features I want to implement for new versions of FirefoxADM.  If you have feature requests, let me know.

Whose Service Is It Anyway?

In recent weeks, a story erupted within the Educational Web 2.0 market, and it showed there exists a worrying lack of understanding about the entire area.

The story goes a little like this:  there is a company called Curverider, set up by a couple of guys who used to work in education.  Their main product is an open source social networking/PLE environment called Elgg.  Their own install of this social network, Eduspaces, gained some traction in the education community and began to get used by a reasonably large number of people.  Curverider then spun off Elgg to become a community-run project in Autumn of this year and all seemed right in the world.  Then, BOOM!, late-December, Curverider announced they were to close Eduspaces on January 10th, as they had made the decision to exit the education market.  If they wanted to create the maximum damage they could, this was the way to do it – a lot of people working in Higher Education go off for Christmas break mid-December and don’t return to work until 7th January at the earliest.  Unsurprisingly, the members of the community who were there were livid, especially as many were using it for assessments and teaching.

As it turned out, within a week, a Canadian NPO called TakingITGlobal.org took over the hosting and database of Eduspaces and the future of the community is again safe.

However, its what happened behind the scenes and the psyche of the community that I find interesting.

In the end of the day, this was a completely free service (with no commercial sponsorship or advertising on the site) being given to the users and a service which seemed like it probably cost quite a bit of time and money for Curverider to host and run.  My initial reaction was to side with Curverider and take an attitude of “the community didn’t pay for it, so Curverider owe them nothing and can do what the hell they want with the service”.

However, the more I thought about this particular type of service, the more my mind changed.  See, there is a thing about Eduspaces that I noticed as I browsed the site.  Simply put, as a tool the software is, well, crap.  The site layout is not good, some features are laughably awful (look at this page from the Browse all communities feature – I bet you can’t tell me without a great deal of pain which of the 82 pages that is!) and its a poor competitor to many of the other social networks.  Yet, its successful.  The measure of how successful a social network is, isn’t how great the software is, how snazzy the layout is or how many buzzwords like AJAX you can shoehorn into it – the measure of success is how big and how active the community is.  Given how important they therefore are, the community deserved to be in on the conversation when the future and closure of Eduspaces was first considered.

The guys from Curverider then explained why it was closing and, boy oh boy, I can’t think of the last time I read such a trite explanation.  According to them, Eduspaces is to close because of a raft of bodies – funding bodies, universities, proprietary software companies.  Anyone but them.  How ridiculous.

What is a horrible paradox is I feel really bad criticising these guys.  After all, if you read the comments on their site, people are appreciative of what they did in providing this service.  All they didn’t appreciate was the relationship between community and service provider.  In announcing the closure of Eduspaces as they did, they massively disrespected the community.  At the same time, I feel the community should police itself to make sure they are not disrespecting the service provided.  In my opinion, all those who were using it for teaching were disrespecting the service, especially as it says in the T’s & C’s that such behaviour is “at your own risk“.  I find it interesting that now TakingITGlobal.org have taken over the service, they have talked about having an “advisory group” of the users.  This definitely helps form the relationship better.  Interesting times ahead here.

Group Policy Preferences

Here’s an interesting tidbit that came out of Microsoft’s Tech-Ed IT Forum conference:  Group Policy Preferences.

Group Policy Preferences is, basically, 20 client side extensions for group policy which Microsoft acquired when it acquired DesktopStandard and its DesktopStandard PolicyMaker Family product.  You can read more about them at the link above.

A lot of people will have their own solutions via scripts which mimic the functionality from some of these extensions but these native tools will allow you to cut back on things like login and startup scripts, have increased auditing information when doing things like Group Policy Results Wizard and allow you to control settings which, to date, haven’t been easy to set with scripts.

Good to see these sort of tools being released to administrators generally and not just as part of the Software Assurance-only Desktop Optimization Pack.

Enterprise and Firefox: Where Are We?

A wee while back, I mentioned that I had gotten involved in an effort called the Firefox Enterprise Working Group.  So, any news to report?

To be honest, despite the valiant efforts of Mike Kaply, things have somewhat stuttered.  The first conference call was very well attended (although I haven’t seen actual numbers) and the debate lively.  Unfortunately, the numbers seemed to dwindle severely over the next 2 or 3 calls before I managed to attend one where I was the only person on the call!  In retrospect, I am unsure whether the conference call idea is so useful – its great for having a lively debate and for sorting out misunderstandings immediately, but a conference call in office hours on the West Coast of the USA is always going to lead to very unsociable times for the conference call from everywhere from mainland Europe to Australasia.  Even though the call was at 10am PDT, that was 6pm for me in the UK and 7/8pm for mainland Europe.  Obviously, for people in Asia, its seriously into the night time for the call.  I can understand why Michael chose the conference call as the “venue” for the Group but maybe some other communications method might be better for the interchange of ideas from here on in (such as the Firefox Enterprise Wiki or a mailing list).

It was interesting listening to how others have created solutions for Firefox.  Everyone seems to have taken slightly different angles on how to go.  However, I remain convinced that the #1 and #2 priorities should be Group Policy support and an MSI installer.  An example of a different view was TeamA, a pseudonym for what I believe to be a major US Bank, who were major proponents of a tool called Mission Control for controlling settings which harks back to Netscape days.  I previously blogged about this.  Whilst it had advantages over Group Policy such as, significantly, it works cross platform, and can control settings over the web, for me it had disadvantages such as the fact that Group Policy is a technology people know and is the technology used in probably 98% of scenarios, Group Policy is used for other related tools such as reporting and audit tools, and thirdly, it would involve the systems administrator putting in place new infrastructure just to control one application.

That latter issue is something that concerns me about the current approach of some and seemingly the one Mozilla Corp prefers.  Want to control settings?  Set up a Mission Control server.  Want to control extensions?  Deploy your own Firefox Extensions server.  Want to control updates?  Deploy your own Firefox Updates server.  Etc etc etc.  If there is one thing that my experience of FirefoxADM has told me, it is that there are two types of Systems Administrator who really needs a very high level of control over systems:  those at the very high end of resources in the likes of Banks and huge corporations, and those at the very low end of resources such as an IT guy for a bunch of schools.  Setting up a load of servers to control one application is just not a possibility for the latter – the mountain is not going to move to Mohammed.

Anyway, in the New Year, I really want to have another look at all the projects I have done, including the much-untouched FirefoxADM, mainly because, despite being not updated and generally unloved for the past 2 and a bit years, it is still working for people and being downloaded and deployed out there more than ever!

Hopefully 2008 will be the year of Firefox in the Enterprise.  Well, can hope.

Why Are All The New Operating Systems Awful?

Its a question worth asking.  Be it Windows Vista, OS X Panther Leopard (thanks, david!) or Ubuntu 7.10, every one I have tried has just been so damned disappointing.

There is an obvious answer to this question:  they are not major leaps over the operating system before them.

I have been using Vista since February on my machine and Ubuntu 7.10 since a few days after it was released.  I can’t say I have noticed the sort of massive slowdowns that people have reported with Vista, but then I did buy it with the components of a new computer, one with a fast dual core, excellent graphics card and 2 GB of fast RAM.  My personal experience of Vista has, all told, been pretty positive but then, I have few peripherals, have nothing like older scanners or printers, etc, and few old pieces of software I needed to get working on it.  However, I appreciate that Vista is much slower on older hardware and have never bothered to try XP to see just how fast it could go in comparison.  My experience with Ubuntu 7.10 has been almost totally the opposite:  at the moment when I boot into Ubuntu, it will work for about 5 minutes and then the mouse will freeze and then, soon after, the keyboard.  Most perplexing, but from searching the web not an issue unique to me.  Sigh, I’ll wait for the next iteration or maybe try a different distro…

In a way, the biggest problem with Vista is that XP Service Pack 2 was released.  A lot of the feature set of Vista has been to beef up the security of the product, but that is also what Service Pack 2 did.  Whilst Vista does ramp up the security to a large extent over Service Pack 2, for most SP2 was “good enough” and, worse, Vista’s improvements have upped security whilst lowering usability.

However, its not enough for me to go back to XP – not when Crysis looks THAT good with DirectX 10!

Jumping

Well, I finally did it – I jumped, at least partially, from my current blog at http://in-cider.spaces.live.com/ to here, In Cider Knowledge 2!

Why?  Well, a number of little things, including the fact I needed something to jump start myself blogging and also to try and change the tone of the blog, have more personal stuff, less dry stuff, maybe even try and mix up the style more (maybe, MAYBE, even put in some pictures every so often!).  Anyway, this is just a placer.  Hopefully the first real post will be along soon enough!