One of my consulting clients is very Windows centric, and I thought it was going to be a problem when my Windows desktop died a few weeks ago. Though, actually, I could never access either their Sharepoint or Exchange servers even when it was up, because there was some software on it that was incompatible with Juniper, so the only way I could get in was with my Vista laptop. Well, just for the hell of it, I tried to access both sites today using Firefox in Fedora, and it seems to be fully functional, so it gets along better with my client’s server than my Windows 2000 machine did.
This is interesting on two levels: first, that the security system didn’t complain, and second, that Linux Firefox seems to play well with Microsoft sites. It’s come a long way, baby.
Sharepoint services come through fairly well on most browsers. That is the Borg mindset of MS. They usually will accept an import of most inputs from other competitors software — you will be assimilated. It is exporting out to other software standards which you will find MS fails short.
There maybe some permissions problem with using Firefox on Sharepoint as you go down further into the backend. If you are administrating the design and access levels of the Sharepoint site then IE starts to work a whole lot better. Also, the Outlook Web Access interface looks a heck of a lot better on IE then the basic browser available through Firefox.
Well, it looks OK to me, and it’s good enough. I’ve never been a big Outlook fan anyway, and only use it under compulsion. I was more interested that it didn’t demand that I load some kind of anti-virus software as it does when I first access it with Windows.