Firefox Not Ready for School District Deployment ...

... or corporate environment either. In response to a proposal to the Snohomish School District (SDS) to mass deploy Firefox on their school's computers, the District's IT Department head fired back a few reasons why Firefox cannot be deployed on such a scale -- no guarantee of support, interoperability with other installed software, browser settings that cannot be locked, Group Policy configuration and no means for mass deployment and/or maintenance of solutions across a network.



The proposal letter was sent by someone who calls himself Spencer, a student who attends one of the schools in the District. The letter, quite frankly, was not so much a plea to the District to use Firefox, but rather a general chastising of Internet Explorer. Readers of young Spencer's post at SpreadFirefox relating his experience not only chastised MSIE, but the IT persons follow-up response as well by calling her (sometimes erroneously "him") ignorant and "brittle".



It is obvious that none of these people read SpreadFirefox's call to enlighten, rather than enter into this mudslinging type of schoolhouse debate. This will not win over any supporters, but will probably have the opposite affect when it comes to School Districts -- they do not do feasibility studies all that often -- and this District (Snohomish) will not be looking at Firefox for quite some time now.



Ironically, young Spencer would have had a better chance at convincing the District to the South of him in Seattle. While this District is much larger, it operates in a dissimilar fashion. Each School within this District is independently Administered. While SSD has a centralized IT Department, the schools have more power over what goes into them and can over-ride their decisions when it comes to the labs themselves. Here is another tip, the IT Department installs Netscape as a default browser, if and when they do get involved with physical installations.



SpreadFirefox's mission to spread the word about Firefox, IMO, should rein in these types of ill-targeted stabs in the dark. You give one IT head a negative impression and that will spread quickly from one District to the next. These people communicate with each other across District lines almost on a daily basis. You are going to need a more coordinated effort to crack these nuts. Each District is different and will require multiple gameplans too.