Subscribe via e-mail: 
Microsoft just released a new version of their IE7 deployment paper. The document has 156 pages. So you can imagine that IE7 deployment can get tricky. However, for the experienced admin many of the things discussed in it will be quite familiar. Nevertheless, it might be a useful reference if you run into problems. The other question is if you need to deploy IE7 if you haven’t done it yet.
I must confess that we still run IE6 on most of our XP machines. So far, only one or two of our users requested an upgrade. Actually, I think that web geeks usually overestimate the importance of a web browser. For most users, it really doesn’t matter if they use IE6, IE7 or Firefox. They just want to browse the web. So they don’t care about tabs, RSS support or whatever.
However, there is one good reason to upgrade to IE7 anyway. It is security. It has become silent about IE6 vulnerabilities since XP SP2. So I didn’t worry too much about it. But it is out of the question that IE7 improves security. That’s why it is on our to-do-list for quite some time. We only had to postpone it because we lost an admin who was supposed to do the job. Meanwhile, deploying IE7 made it to the top of our priority list. Actually, we are short before the rollout. So this new paper comes in handy. What’s about you? Do you still run IE6 in your organization?
95% of my users are on IE7. They really like the tabbed browsing feature which allows them to keep their desktop less cluttered.
The only reason that most of our line users still have IE 6 is we’ve run into problems with our outside vendors/suppliers (Banking and Travel Agencies) that don’t support IE 7 as of yet.
I know, IE7′s been out a year, as has Vista, and nobody supports it. Once we’ve got the go ahead from them, we’ll install IE7 for everybody.
You can’t do much about the new machines (unless you’re ordering them with XP SP2) but we have some control over the older stuff.
I, however, wouldn’t go back to IE 6 unless someone paid me to. I enjoy the tab browsing in Firefox and Opera, but not all the sites worked right due to all of the Active X controls that everything uses.
At the end of the day, this white paper is just another document to read before we do what we do to make sure we don’t break anything significant.
Aaron, it really depends on the kind of users you have. To my experience the average web surfer only visits one web site at a time. That’s why they don’t need tabs. Of course, I use tabs. Actually, I use them in IE long before IE7 or Firefox saw the light.
Scribe6, we had similar problems with SSL certificates. The problem often is that you don’t know what kind of web apps your users work with. They are not always installed on your own servers. This is the reason why this upgrade is really tricky.