Updating Free Software in the Enterprise?

wallykeyster asks: "I'm an IT Director for a small private university in the U.S., and we are largely a Microsoft shop. We pay over $15,000 each year for our Campus Agreement so that we can upgrade the desktop OS to our version of choice, run Office, and have some Client Access Licenses. I would like to move to FOSS solutions, but I'm having trouble finding support for Enterprise management. For example, OpenOffice and Firefox (both of which I use personally) would be easy first steps, but IE is updated automatically via our SUS server (and settings pushed to clients via group policies) and Office updates will be included soon. How are other larger organizations (i.e. more than 200 desktops) dealing with software deployment and updates? Is anyone using Zen with Novell Desktop Linux?"

Comments

Same boat

[Jett]

I'm in the same boat where I work. I'm trying to get Firefox officially supported, the biggest sticking point is the lack of an easy method to push updates. I think this is one of the biggest reasons Firefox isn't widely deployed in the corporate environment yet, sure it's easy to install it yourself and update it yourself - but that's not a solution in a controlled environment.

Re:Same boat

[Verteiron]

That gets it on the client systems, sure. But how do you keep a user from (for example) changing their proxy setting? With IE you can lock the user out via Group Policies. With Firefox, well.. I'm not aware of a way to implement similar restrictions.

It sounds like a Windows Server Administrator Template Policy would go a long way towards Firefox acceptance in corporate environments. You'd need some kind of plugin for Firefox that makes it read values from the Windows registry, as well.

Alternatively, a Firefox plugin could read the Group Policy restrictions targeted at IE, and "translate" them internally to the Firefox equivalents, but such a solution would be a sloppy hack at best.