I’ve been having difficulty trying to use any of the Junta de Andalucia’s online offices.
The online office is supposed to allow you to fill in and send forms online, using a digital signature, without having to go to the office and wait in a queue.
Anyway, it wouldn’t work. Annoying. So I sent off a help request.
It turns out that the online office of the Junta de Andalucia, codenamed “Orion”, is now obsolete and won’t work with the latest browsers.
You see (I’m supposing here) Orion was developed back in 2008. Since then, computing has progressed, and the systems on which it was built (Java) has changed out of all recognition, basically because of security problems.
Internet Explorer 11 and Firefox 27 are all too advanced for Orion, meaning you can only interact with the Junta de Andalucia using older versions of browsers, which you aren’t supposed to use, because of security vulnerabilities and the like.
Java on the browser is full of security holes anyway: all the main browsers nowadays don’t come with Java enabled, because of the problems. There are other, newer technologies which are more secure. Not really the thing to be sending your banking details to the government on.
The Junta de Andalucia technical team were unable to tell me when this would be resolved, or if. They limited themselves to saying:
“El problema reside en el navegador web utilizado para acceder a la oficina virtual, IE 11.09 no esta soportado. Adjunto un documento con las matrices de compatibilidad existentes según sistema operativo, navegador y java. Ruego que uses uno de ellos. Saludos.”
So if you follow best computing practices, keeping your computer up to date, etc.. you’re stuffed, and have to drive to your nearest government office, and wait in a queue all day.
And with the current government cutbacks, you think solving this will be easy? The problem probably started because they laid off the software engineers, so now they’ve got to go and beg them to come back!
Here’s the official Junta de Andalucia compatibilidad document with the list of supported browsers and operating systems.