How To: Deploy Firefox throughout your Organization

Before you proceed any further with mass deployment of Firefox in your organization or entire network, conduct a survey to determine the websites used by your employees to do their job. Then, test those websites in Firefox and ensure that they work [in most cases they will]. You are now ready to deploy Firefox throughout your network.

We will cover two topics in this post.

1. We will learn about a way to deploy Firefox on all the computers in your organization.
2. We will then learn to control various settings of Firefox like we do for Internet Explorer, such as proxy settings, enabling and disabling certain options etc.

Mass Deployment

For installing Firefox throughout the network, you will need MSI installer version of Firefox. You can grab your copy of MSI installer of latest version of Firefox from frontmotion. The MSI installer is Active Directory deployable, upgradeable and contains official binaries. The package can detect and upgrade already installed Non-MSI versions as well and is packaged along with Macromedia Flash Player plugin.

Active Directory deployment is fairly simple task, just follow the steps mentioned on [http://www.frontmotion.com/Firefox/].

For IT Administrators who want to build their custom MSI Installer package, the site has a ‘Firefox Packaging Service‘ that will let you build a custom installer. Select the language, version and up to ten extensions and download a custom Firefox version. What more? You can distribute your custom installer to your friends and customers with your own or favorite extensions along with it.

Controlling settings within Firefox for the Enterprise

Certain companies do not want users to select custom proxies or change the settings in the browsers on their desktops. A tool called [FirefoxADM] will allow centrally managed locked and/or default settings in Firefox via Group Policy and Administrative Templates in Active Directory.