Open letter to Salford University ISD


To ISD, IT Support services, IT Planning & Management and whom else it might concern:


Over the four years I have studied at Salford University I have seen major improvements to the facilities that are available to both academics, as well as students. That is from both, the software and hardware point of view. Well done!

I do sincerely hope that at least some of the suggestions came from the students' population and so it enabled you to move closer to the expectations and the capabilities that are desired in this day and age.

The purpose of this email is to make the case for a new application, which at this moment is not available through the university PC terminals. Yet it would significantly enhance knowledge accessibility, on-line experience and not only that it would further improve the on-line threat protection to the network. I am talking of the Firefox 1.0 web browser, which after a long period of testing was recently introduced in its full official version.

The quality, user-friendliness and popularity of this FREE software has been demonstrated by the fantastic interest by the wide community of Internet users. This software has achieved almost 10,000,000 downloads within the short period of one month. The strength of this software lies in its "open architecture", which results in many useful utilities being constantly made available for download at no extra cost.

The rising popularity has been recently demonstrated by an extension from Athens, allowing for an integration of the Athens toolbar (see preview). This particular function (and others) makes the browser to be the obvious choice for the learning community and institutions, such as ours.

The software administrators will be pleased that Firefox 1.0 can be "mass deployed" with the relevant functions (extensions, themes) pre-installed, similar to Microsoft's IEAK (Internet Explorer Administration Kit).

Would you, please seriously consider this suggestion, as this offers a win-win position for us the users and you the administrators. As you are aware security threats to Microsoft's Internet Explorer appear with seemingly exponential growth and no question constitute a huge operational nuisance and added cost.

Thank you for your help on this matter.

Kind regards,

Petr Faitl
BSc Business Studies with Finance

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