Cross-posted from the Enterprise2.0 blog

Summary
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.

Enterprise Working Group Incubator
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.

As always, if any of these topics or projects are of interest to you, please visit the wiki, participate in the calls or simply leave a comment on this here Blog.

Some of you may not be aware of another project being worked on by members of my team callled the AJAX Toolkit Framework (ATF). ATF provides an AJAX Tooling Environment in Eclipse that includes things like a DOM Inspector, an HTTP request monitor, JavaScript debugger, JavaScript editor with validation and code completion, and more. This functionality was created by embedding Mozilla technology into Eclipse using JavaXPCOM.

What’s exciting is that we final got all through all the legal hurdles so you can now download one package that contains the entire environment, with stuff that isn’t relevant to ATF removed. So just download the M4 milestone from here, unzip it and you can try it out. If you want to see how it works, you can check out the demos, but note that we are in the process of updating those to the new version.

I’ll be at AJAXWorld next week talking about this project so feel free to look me up. I’ll definitely be at the ATF presentation on Monday at 5:40 and I’ll probably be hanging around IBM booth on the Expo Floor at other times. If you want to set up a time to meet with me about something specific while I’m out there, feel free to contact me.

The website iDOO added support for hCards and created an Operator user script to integrate with iDOO. The even plugged Operator in their announcement. Nice work!

You can get more information here.

So it’s only been a month or two, and participants on the Firefox Enterprise Working Group calls have dwindled. So I’m putting out this plea:

If you are at all interested in Firefox in the Enterprise, please either post to the Firefox Enterprise Wiki (participants section), participate in the call or reply to this post with your thoughts.

If we are ahead of the curve here and need to slow down or if phone calls are the wrong communication medium, we want to fund that out. We also need to know is if this is something that is important to a lot of folks or if it’s only important to a handful of people.

So please, let us know what you think we should do next.

Here’s the info about the next call:

We’re planning our fourth call for Wednesday, September 19th 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

The theme is “Extensions.” We’re going to talk about how folks are using extensions in their organizations.

Other upcoming calls include Deployment and Microsoft Group Policy vs. Mission Control.

I’ll be away for a few days, and since I’m not famous enough to have a guest blogger, feel free to watch these podcasts of what I’ll be doing.

Disney Cruise Line Podcasts

I’m going to hold off on an EWG meeting this week. Our next one is scheduled for Sept 19. The topic will be Extensions, since the last meeting didn’t happen (Sorry about that).

We’re already starting to see things kind of drop off. I’d REALLY like to try to make sure that doesn’t happen. So if you have any interest in Firefox in the enterprise, please plan to attend the meeting on Sept 19. And please feel free to read/update information on the Enterprise wiki.