Question

I sometimes see reported that enterprises ban Flash. Such as here, from Adobe:

“Some employers prohibit Flash Player due to concerns that it will be used for video (consuming excessive bandwidth) or games (consuming work time).” from this link:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/enterprise_deployment.html

and here:

http://netforbeginners.about.com/od/f/f/flash.htm

I’m considering using Flex for a web application that external enterprises would need to access to be my customer. I’m wondering if there’s any conventional wisdom how prevalent this blocking is (what percentage of enterprises block it; and/or which enterprises block it, if anyone has examples).

So far, I know iOS blocks flash, but not aware of any corporations that do as a matter of policy.

Any feedback appreciated.

Answer 1

I’ve been building Enterprise Rich Internet Apps for about 5 years now. In my experience, I have never seen a company block flash outright. They might block video (requests done to youtube, vimeo, etc) or social/gaming sites (kongregate, facebook, twitter, etc), but that is all URL based and not content based.

Most of them don’t block it because for one, a lot of them uses Flex for very large and important web apps that generates/saves millions of dollars. Normally, the most stringent web policies are applied at banks or other large corporations and I can safely say that I’ve worked with many of them and they have never blocked a based on content (unless it’s porno).