Microsoft helps enterprise customers move to Internet Explorer 11 and Windows 10
While everyday consumers are important to Microsoft, a decent chunk of its income comes from enterprise customers. This group of users can be slow to upgrade software, and Microsoft is keen to encourage them to upgrade to Internet Explorer 11 before support for earlier versions come to an end in January next year.
The company is only too aware that many people are running web services and apps designed for older versions of Internet Explorer. Laying the groundwork for ultimate upgrades to Windows 10, Microsoft is pushing the Enterprise Mode, the Enterprise Mode Site List and Enterprise Site Discovery feature of IE11 as a way to benefit from security updates and technical support whilst simultaneously paving the way for a Windows 10 upgrade further down the line.
In a blog post, Microsoft's Jatinder Mann and Fred Pullen call upon enterprise users to make the switch from Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10, explaining that the Enterprise Mode found in Internet Explorer 11 provides backwards compatibility with the IE8 rendering engine. A survey commissioned by Microsoft found that customers who had made the switch to IE11 found it was not only quicker than expected, but also resulted in reduced costs and simplified testing.
New features have been added to Enterprise Mode to help improve compatibility and the MSDN blog post includes full details about how to make the jump to Internet Explorer 11.
We know that upgrading to a new browser can be a time-consuming and potentially costly venture. To help reduce these costs, we introduced the Enterprise Site Discovery toolkit to help you prioritize which sites you should be testing based on their usage in your enterprise. For example, if the data shows that no one is visiting a particular legacy Web app anymore, you may not need to test or fix it. This tool also gives you information on what document mode the page runs in your current browser, so you can better understand how to fix that site if it breaks in a newer version of the browser. This tool is currently only supported in IE11, but we are bringing Enterprise Site Discovery support to IE8, IE9, and IE10 very soon.
Of course this is not just about pushing people to using the current version of Internet Explorer. Having made the transition to IE11, customers are far better placed to make the switch to Windows 10 when it is released later in the year.