""Example, you can easily change the home page of every user by simply creating a policy object and applying it to an Active Directory User"
Solution: Don't Do That."
Yes I think locking down the home page was a bad example, better examples of group policy use were the other settings like security, etc. that IE exposes through the group policy. Even the proxy settings, try explaining to hundreds of users how to set proxy settings.
Adding group policy support to an application is dead simple -
- you just make a text based policy template containing all the settings you want to expose,
- admins import that into the group policy manager,
- it reveals a bunch of check boxes or text boxes for each option,
- the admin applies the policy
- the windows PCs pick up the settings and apply them into the registry,
- the next time firefox is run it just needs to call a few APIs to check the settings and it is done.
I had a prototype of this working for an application I used to work on in a matter of hours. If open source wants to be excepted in the enterprise they must support this. (I won't even go into how this is done on a linux machine as I have no idea)
