Lotus notes 7 now supports Firefox, that is a good news. With Firefox being available in .Msi packages the deployement problem in corporate space is solved. I have not dig into the maintenance issues for the enterprise, those issues are :
1) How do you maintain configuration on thousands of desktops ?
2) How do you distribute one extension to thousands of desktops ?
3) You need to make sure that intranet sites, installed web applications work with Firefox.
Point 3 has been solved by IBM for Lotus 7. The compagny I work for uses Lotus, and using Firefox with it was just painfull, recently they updated to the latest version of Lotus Notes 6.0, And my database has been updated. I can now decently read my mails with Firefox on windows (its sucks too much in Camino on my macs). But can't reply, I still need to use IE.
Now point 3 can be partially addressed by the "Mozilla community". Many of use do work in the IT industry, some of us doing development, others doing system administration tasks. How can we prepare's Firefox adpotion in the corporate space ? Very easily :
Lest say you work with a product which is web enabled. If such produc does not work with Firefox, you can request from the product's editor support for Firefox, even if your compagny does not need such support at the moment. The editor will think that the request comes from it's client, and will take notice. I'm not saying we will see immediate support for firefox, but software publisher might change their longterm strategy and start thinking about supporting the fox in their products.
I will do my part. I use Computer Associates products, in my compagny and in the client for which I work. One of their product is IE only. I will open two issues (so they'll be issued from two different compagnies), to ask the web service to be useable with Ff.
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