Updating Free Software in the Enterprise?

Posted by Cliff on Monday May 16, 2005 @07:58AM from the one-is-easy-one-hundred-isn't dept.

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?"

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Same boat by Jett · 2005-05-16 08:07 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.