Deployment of Silverlight RIA application blocked

Question

Cross posting from a question I raised on serverfault.com

Recently I came up against an IT policy whereby a potential customer would not advocate use of our web based product as we use Silverlight for some RIA functionality.

I am aware that the client footprint is not as high a flash (and nor will it be for sometime to come), but I can find no good reason why someone would intentionally block the use of silverlight within their environment..

Has anyone else had a similar experience, and how did you resolve?

Are there known security, memory issues etc. with the plugin that I should be aware of.

Answer 1

Is it "intentionally block" or (more likely) "we're not going to deploy the Silverlight runtime just to run your product?"

It's conceivable that some IT manager might perceive a greater security risk from Silverlight than from Flash, but that would presume some basic knowledge on his/her part of the differences between the two platforms. More likely they just don't want to go through the process of deploying the runtime. I think you have to have admin rights to install the runtime, so if their systems are locked down it would require intervention by the IT staff to deploy it.

Other than that I can't think of a good reason not to allow Silverlight. It could be an anti-Microsoft thing or a misunderstanding of how Silverlight works.