Consider enterprise features and distribution/deployment options

[andiemmadavieswilcox]

Investigation summary

It looks like it will be feasible to add functionality that will allow network administrators to both configure and deploy the extension throughout an organisation! 🎉

Features/goals

1. Import/export configuration (useful for individuals and organisations).
2. Allow reading of initial configuration from storage.managed.
3. Write user documentation and/or tooling for configuring and deploying the extension.

Scheduling

Since this extension is largely targeted for use with live systems for businesses, I'd say it's important that this gets included as part of the first public release (i.e. v1.0). I've filed an issue for fleshing-out an implementation plan for this work: #29.

Resources

• http://www.dennisspan.com/deploying-google-chrome-extensions-using-group-policy
• https://developer.chrome.com/apps/external_extensions
• https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/storage
• https://developer.chrome.com/apps/manifest/storage

[andiemmadavieswilcox]

My current thinking is to allow some mechanism to read initial configuration from an API endpoint, which serves-up some JSON representing the initial state of the extension, and then the user can customise from there. Maybe allow also posting config changes back to another endpoint (would require auth) to update the organisation's default settings?

[andiemmadavieswilcox]

I'll document my thoughts and findings in comments first and then summarise them in the issue description field when I've decided on the best approach to solve the problem.

[andiemmadavieswilcox]

Some potentially useful articles regarding deploying Chrome extensions within organisations:

• http://www.dennisspan.com/deploying-google-chrome-extensions-using-group-policy
• https://developer.chrome.com/apps/external_extensions
• https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/storage (see storage.managed)

[andiemmadavieswilcox]

If it's possible to push an initial default state (see third bullet in last comment) when deploying the plugin to organisation members, then it may not be necessary to implement support for grabbing configuration from JSON-serving API endpoints.

[andiemmadavieswilcox]

If that's the case, it'd be good to provide a "import/export config" functionality, so that admins can alter the configuration to be deployed across the organisation.

[andiemmadavieswilcox]

It looks like it is indeed possible to configure the extension on a per-organisation basis through deployment! 🎉 https://developer.chrome.com/apps/manifest/storage