french police deploy firefox and thunderbird
I just read over at Standblog that the French Gendarmerie Nationale (national police force) made the decision to move 70,000 seats to Firefox and 45,000 seats to Thunderbird. That's awesome!
When will we see similar moves here in the US?
reactions, thoughts, comments, etc.
When you start speaking French and use the Metric System.
Posted by: Van Damme | January 3, 2006 11:05 PM
To answer your question: Firefox is getting a lot of attention from corporate and governmental IT people. The big issue is deployment: How do I roll out Firefox on a zillion workstations?
How is that MSI package coming along? If Mozilla can demonstrate that Firefox can be rolled out in a big organisation quickly and easily, we will see more organisations adopt Firefox.
I would also recommend a "Spread Firefox" campaign aimed at big organisations:
** Lots of technical advice (how to roll out, how to migrate Intranet applications away from ActiveX and MSIE, troubleshooting)
** Examples and testimonials (French Gendarmerie National, IBM, others)
** Specific extensions for companies.
** Training stuff (presentations, movie clips, FAQ's)
Posted by: ADAXl | January 4, 2006 12:44 AM
Van Damme: LOL! So any-day-now in Canada? :)
Posted by: Limulus | January 4, 2006 3:13 AM
Just a quick message to correct a typo. You must write "Gendarmerie Nationale" (with a trailing "E" :).
Example here: http://www.defense.gouv.fr/sites/gendarmerie/
Posted by: Plop | January 4, 2006 4:24 AM
i work for the u.s. army in georgia and it will probably be a while before we move to firefox simply because the people at our directorate of information management here don't always seem to know what is going on. but we did receive an announcement from centcom once about a phishing attack on the A.K.O. website that had a screenshot showing firefox. there are those who use it in the organization, but it is not officially supported.
Posted by: theliar | January 4, 2006 4:34 AM
Great news for Firefox and Thunderbird.
This story is also posted on Digg http://digg.com/linux_unix/French_Gendarmerie_National_switches_to_Firefox_and_Thunderbird
Posted by: GeekyGirl | January 4, 2006 1:35 PM
What's blocking MSI support now seems to be more the setup that Mozilla-the-Corporation uses than the feedback from Mozilla-the-Org:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=231062#c104
I haven't used them myself, but nightlies seem to have .msi files ...
Posted by: Louis St-Amour | January 6, 2006 12:17 AM
The sooner more move the better.
According to many computer magazines FIREFOX is already getting almost as much attention as INTERNET EXPLORER from hackers and virus spreaders. With any luck 99% of you guys and others will move to FIREFOX. If your dreams come true and that can happen, then us faithful to MS will be left in peace, lol.
Paula
Posted by: paula | January 20, 2006 9:17 AM