Download the Microsoft IE9 beta here
And here it is folks the new Internet Explorer 9 Beta has just landed and everyone can download and go play with it as you wish. I’ve done quite a bit of that for you with NINE 1 minute tours of some of IE9’s new features. Features like tab pinning, OneBox, Notifications and Privacy all covered in under a minute each. If you’re an IT Pro though you’re going to want more details about things like IEAK (!!) (Internet Explorer Administration Kit) how to manage IE 9 through group policy and lots more lovely stuff. You might want to watch my one minute videos on Internet Explorer 9 Beta.
Quick and Clean
So what can I tell you about IE9 from the IT Pro's point of view. The first thing you notice is that it’s fast, the 2nd that it’s clean. It’s fast in every way I’ve used it, it’s fast at shopping on Amazon, it’s fast at Hotmail, it’s fast at Google reader, it’s fast at administering my blog on Wordpress, it’s fast at SharePoint stuff, it’s fast at Outlook Web Access, It’s fast administering Windows Intune (which uses Silverlight so plugins are fast) and uploading 9 videos to YouTube means I can tell you it’s fast with flash. Fast, Fast, Fast.
It’s also damn pretty to look at, that stripped down UI which melts into the background means I can concentrate on my SharePoint site or on my web site.
OneBox is like a command line for the web. I’ve actually found the OneBox to be a huge improvement as an IT Pro with our penchant for command lines because it brings everything together and I can type faster than I can point to things with a mouse! I want to go to a Favorite called “Dashboard” and I just type D-A-S-H-Shift+Enter in OneBox and it’s done. Visual search is a stellar feature which builds on the instant searching already built into OneBox and all those existing search providers work with OneBox too. A point to note on security here.
A point to note on security here, any kind of instant searching of the web includes a two way dialogue with the search provider. Be that in the web page itself or in a search box in a brower. We’ve taken a stand for user rights with IE9 and we make it so that that functionality has to be initially enabled and you can disable it at any time. Not all browsers do this, it’s important.
The back and forward buttons, the mainstay of navigation in a browser hold some magic sauce too. When you pin a tab – oh yeah you can drag tabs to your task bar to pin them! – it turns the website into an application and the back and forward buttons follow the websites colour scheme. It’s a small thing but it makes an amazing difference changing from the browser centric approach of other browsers to this web-centric one.
The web just works
It’s kind of obvious for a web browser but the key thing is that it’s about the web. Immediately in IE9 you see that the browser melts into the background but it does that in more than just a visual way. IE9 is very standards compliant and interoperable really taking advantage of HTML5 standards and making them fly, our most standards compliant browser yet.
Ok lets stop.
Usually when we (Microsoft) say that people think we mean we took a spec and built on it to make it better, not in this case, we took the HTML5 spec (an area we’re leading the W3C with) and made it the best it could be by extending into the power of the PC using the he 90% of the PC that most browsers don’t. You’ll have seen the fish.
But what if you don’t have a mega whizzy PC? Well your devs still get the opportunity to code in a ubiquitous, reusable way. Code once, run everywhere.
Safe
We’ve built on the solid safety foundation that came to fruition with IE8 and in IE9 it seems to get even more “comfortable” which I guess is what you get from 2nd generation security. From the viewpoint of the IT Pro though this level of security is Phenomenal. IE9 Includes technology to block the single biggest hole in your corporate armour – your users downloading dodgy stuff. I might not be talking this up enough.
IE9 users reputation management and SmartScreen technology to instantly, seamlessly respond to new threats. That means that you don’t have to wait whilst some AV lab dudes cook up antigen. That reduces the response time and that reduces your attack surface lots!
Management
Management is something that gets us IT Pros a bit gusshy, we love to manage stuff and know what’s going on. IE9 includes some amazingly powerful tools out of the box. NO other browser has this level of managent. I don’t see any other browser that lets you deploy this easily either.
Take this scenario:
Your intranet site is crawling along, your users are complaining, you’ve got a headache, the phone won’t stop…you need to work out what’s going on.
IE9 includes “Developer” tools which are perfect for you to use (just hit F12). The tools now include Network tracing, so you can look at your intranet site (or any site) and see what’s causing the performance bottleneck. Ahh yes it’s that massive JPG that Bob the MD just uploaded to the company home page to announce his new pet Chihuahua!
The developer tools give you all manner of tools to fully understand what’s going on and to troubleshoot issues your users are having with the sites their visiting.
You also get everything you know and trust for managing IE9 – or at least you will do when we reach full release – so you’ll get over 1500 Group policy settings to control all aspects of the users experience (including New in IE9 control over Add-ons!), you’ll get the IEAK to help streamline and manage your Internet Explorer deployment. WSUS can manage IE9, Windows Intune will be able to and SCCM will have your back too. Slipstream installation means you can install IE9 into your existing deployment packages with real ease.
And do you know when anyone else is going to release a patch for their browser? We’ll do it on patch Tuesday thanks very much!
Reliability
The reliability of having patches on the same day every month is just one thing, you need to know that the browsers not going to crash every five minutes and cause your users pain. It’s not. If one tab crashes the whole house of cards won’t come crashing down. IE9 has automatic hang and crash recovery – your user don’t even have to do anything to take advantage of this stuff!
Tab crash recovery was introduced with IE8 but with IE9 it’s extended to tab hang recovery – so the effects of a particular tab hanging, because of poor java script for example, are kept away from the rest of the experience. Take that infinite loop!
How you can be an IE9 hero
Wouldn’t it be cool if every PC you deployed had a customized icon on the task bar for your company Intranet. Wouldn’t the boss love that? Simple. Take 3 lines of HTML code (+1 for each jump list entry), add it to the header of your web site and save. Then drag the tab to the task bar. Check out this video for how to do just that. I’ll post more on this when some of the dev dudes posts become live.
Do that and you get a pretty darn custom looking browser for you Intranet site. Try it now with Gorillaz website, they’ve already made the code changes.
What’s more this functionality can be enhanced with some java script to include notification icons (just like Outlook and messenger) – perhaps number of new articles on your company intranet today?
What you should do now
Go get the IE9 Beta and try it out. If you need to test code side by side with IE8 for some reason then get the latest platform preview from the IE Test Drive Site or check out http://beautyoftheweb.com for more.
...very lucky people indeed, because they are the proud recipients of a Windows 7 mug. Yes, that’s right, tea breaks just got glam. One of these beauties is winging its way to the chosen five as I write:
Congratulations to:
Mark McVey
Nasir Naeem
David Masters
Jon Baggaley
David Gargon
A special mention goes to Jammy Craig who sent in a delicious photo of his baby daughter, Emily. There’s a mug in the post for you two, too.
My personal favourite was David Masters' photo...someone's got the right idea in that organisation ;-)
What do you deploy to your people as part of your corporate standard desktop? Windows 7 – yep gotta have that! Office 2010? Yep you know you need to moving to it if you want your people to work as efficiently as possible. MDOP – well obviously you’re going to be using parts of MDOP to get the job done, be it App-V to deploy your line of business app or Med-V to deploy the actual desktop. Over and above that what more are you packing in? Is Silverlight in there? In this post that’s exactly what I propose. You should be rolling Silverlight as part of your standard practice.
I can already hear the question screaming in over the ether…Why? Why? Why?!
And I can hear the reasons for not doing it too… “it’s another thing to maintain”, “it’ll encourage people to watch x-y-z instead of working”, “we don’t code for Silverlight, none of our own apps use Silverlight”, Actually that’s a good way to answer the why.
“It’s another thing to maintain”
That is a stance that you could take, given how hard other plugins are to manage. But we’ve thought about it well in advance and there are two very easy ways to do it. Firstly Windows Update is aware of Silverlight, so your WSUS, SCCM or SMS infrastructure that you’ve already deployed to manage your business is ready to keep your Silverlight clients on the latest version. Then there’s Windows Intune, when it’s released there’s yet another option for management.
Secondly Silverlight itself can check for updates and install them, something that’s controllable via group policy. What’s required for this “self update” option is for the user to have Administrator access to their PC and an Internet connection.
If you have a more tightly controlled environment then option one is probably for you but if you’ve chosen not to do too much in the way of management you’ve got yourself covered with option 2.
“It’ll encourage people to watch x-y-z instead of working”
Really? I’m not sure there’s a huge amount of merit in the argument for blocking peoples access to specific sites these days. It might be me, I might not be seeing it, but we don’t block access to iPlayer (or SkyPlayer which uses Silverlight) at Microsoft and I don’t see people watching TV shows all day. Surely as an IT Pro it’s better to provide the flexibility in case they do come across a business critical site that uses Silverlight – perhaps something using Pivot for really rich BI?
“We don’t code for Silverlight, none of our own apps use Silverlight”
Ahh the famous case of the chicken and the egg. I’m a firm believer that if you give people the ability to build something they’ll push the envelope and really build SOMETHING. How much of a difference would it make to your people if your line of business application actually looked the part and was so easy to maintain that the dev guys were able to keep it beating with the pulse of your business and users? IT Pros should be leading here, providing the tools and capabilities to make things better. It’s the same reason that I always think it’s best to deploy 64bit over 32bit where possible. Not because you need it right now, but you might.
I always remember being forced to deploy another browser plugin because a CBT (Computer Based Training) course was developed that would only run with version 9.55 or later and we were on version 7, in a regulated industry where you need everyone (that was about 10k people) to complete the training in 30 days time it was a painful lesson.
Do you deploy Office? Well if you do and if you intend to allow people to use Office 2010 Web Apps then you’ll get a much better experience with Silverlight installed as helps with even little things like synchronising files to the web. The Office deployment guide goes into far more detail:
Silverlight enables a better online experience with Office.com, powers the Office 2010 interactive guides (available with Office 2010), improves the user experience of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, improves the performance of Office Web Companion applications, and helps with the process of uploading Office documents to cloud services.
So all up, if you want the best Office 2010 experience you want to be installing Silverlight and if you don’t you’re going to miss out on some great features – the interactive guides significantly diminish the learning curve for your users!
From the why we move into the how:
How do I deploy Silverlight at work?
As I’ve mentioned a couple of times above, Silverlight is pretty easy to deploy and we’ve done all the heavy lifting for you with the trusty deployment guide. But to summarise it you can:
The last option isn’t mentioned in the deployment guide, however it’s as simple as installing before you sysprep your image and you can then mange Silverlight using WSUS and Group policy to keep it up to date. It’s probably best to use this option as a more tactical move if you’re a large organisation.
Resources:
For more information on Windows 7 deployment see Springboard, for more on Silverlight see Silverlight.net for more information on Optimized Desktop see
There’s a lot going on with Internet Explorer at the moment with the IE9 Beta having just launched and you might be wondering what the best course of action is for your business. Well we just published some guidance on what to do, but I’ll summarise it for you. Roll out the Windows Optimized Desktop: Windows 7 with IE 8, Office 2010 and Silverlight using the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) to help.
What you shouldn’t do is wait for Internet Explorer 9 or delay your rollout in any way. Why?
Because your business will lose out in the short term when it could be making strides in efficiency. And everyone* loves Windows 7 as this lifehacker poll shows. And also, there will always be v-next.
Internet Explorer 8 is a great browser for the corporate desktop, it’s secure, it’s manageable and it’s really easy to roll out. It will also be easy to move to IE9 when you have IE8 rolled out and we’ll have tools when we go to full release to help with that migration and additional group policy settings to help with management. I’m reminded of iconic “Don’t Panic, Carry on” posters, mugs and other tut.
That said, evaluate everything with IE9 starting now – there’s no need to wait to make sure stuff works, like your intranet sites, it’s a pay it forward exercise. Get to know HTML5 and other improvements and if you need to test sites along side IE8 then you can use the Platform Preview (version 5 was released at the same time as Beta)
*everyone is hyperbole but most people do
Simon’s becoming quite a partner in crime with me on the UK TechNet blog, and a very good one he makes, too. Visit Simon’s own TechNet blog to find out more about him and his part in the Microsoft UK IT pro team.
Here’s the latest update from the TechEd Europe team.
Join the discussion at TechEd Europe – propose your BOF session by October 10
Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) sessions are open discussions on technology related topics moderated and organised by the INETA Europe / GITCA Community. Propose a topic and join the conversation - BOF organisers are accepting your topic submissions through October 10.
Connect with your fellow attendees and expand your networking opportunities by thousands Opt-in to the Tech·Ed Europe 2010 Delegate Directory and let people know you're attending the event! This is your chance to make connections with the people that share your professional background and interests before, during, and after the conference. You can choose the information you want to share with other delegates - blogs, social network accounts, email, or more. We'll publish the directory in October, but you can sign up at any time. If you didn't join the directory during registration you can still sign up by returning to the registration site and accessing the Returning Services Menu, Attendee Directory.
We’ll be attending the IP EXPO conference again this year and the IT pro team has been working hard to cover everything you want to hear from us.
We’d love to see you at Microsoft Stand # 366, where we’ll have a gaggle of Microsoft UK experts across such topics as Windows Server 2008 R2, Virtualisation, System Centre (private cloud), and Windows Azure, SQL Azure and Microsoft Online Services (public cloud).
Highlights include:
Zane Adams, General Manager of Azure and Middleware, delivering the Microsoft keynote Microsoft Cloud Computing: IT-as-a-Service – Taking Care of Business
Technical breakout session in the Cloud Services and Applications Theatre: Microsoft Cloud Platform: Enterprise-Class Architecture, delivered by Steve Plank, Architect Evangelist – Public Cloud
For Crying Out Cloud – Show Me What’s in the Cloud for Me! A Cloud labs session delivered by our Private Cloud technical duo, Matt McSpirit, Partner Technology Advisor and Simon May, IT Pro Evangelist
Register for IT Expo here – the IT pro team looks forward to meeting you.
Join Microsoft and Ultima for the Ultimate Desktop Experience Day on 21 October at Microsoft Reading.
The Ultimate Desktop Experience day covers the whole story of desktop optimisation from Microsoft. There will be a commercial stream featuring such topics as case studies, business benefits and licensing; and multiple technical streams covering application compatibility, application virtualisation and Windows 7.
If you’d like to join in the fun, please register here.
It was another manic week on the UK TechNet blog – I feel I need a weekend to recharge my fingertips. Here’s what we’ve been up to this week.
On Monday I went poking about in TechNet again and found a New TechNet Virtual Lab helping you to install Forefront Unified Access Gateway 2010. The Labs are great and they’re updated pretty frequently so I’ll keep my eyes open for new topics.
Tuesday’s action featured the new Software Update 1 for Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) 2010 Service Pack 1 along with a nice TechNet library article detailing Microsoft IT’s migration of Microsoft.com to Windows Azure platform.
On Wednesday I found the Preview of Windows Small Business Server 7 and since I posted it an awful lot of you have read the post to find out more.
Thursday’s fun followed up the Internet Explorer 9 beta launch with a fabulous article from Simon May (have I mentioned how great Simon is?), IT Pros and IE9 - what should you do. We also posted the latest news from the TechEd Europe 2010 team and invited you to join us at Microsoft at IP Expo – 20-21 October.
The Ultimate Desktop Experience Day was today’s news – we’ve teamed up with Ultima to stage a day covering the desktop optimisation story. Hope to see you there.
See you on Monday, folks!
Make time to tune into this Springboard Series Virtual Roundtable on 30 September at 5pm for a virtual, interactive roundtable discussion on migration strategies, standards, and support for organisations moving from Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 8.
Tune in live or catch the on-demand session afterwards here.
As organisations deploy Windows 7, many still depend on web applications that were designed for Internet Explorer 6. Will they still work, and what can you do when they don’t? Join a panel of IT Professionals, Microsoft specialists and technical experts to discuss best practices to simplify and accelerate the migration to Internet Explorer 8. Topics will include an explanation of the causes of and solutions for application compatibility issues (including policy, code, and virtualisation solutions), an introduction to tools, and a review of best practices.
Are you looking to plan, pilot or deploy Windows and Office?
Our very own Microsoft Campus in Reading is one of the stops on the upcoming European Springboard Series Tour of Microsoft Windows, Office and MDOP Deployment Workshops. The workshops will cover Office 2010, key deployment strategies for Windows 7, the Microsoft Desktop Optimisation Pack, as well as show you the value of getting trained and certified in these key products.
Find out why Windows 7 has received rave reviews from IT organisations and is setting records as the fastest selling operating system in history, and find out why so many IT Pros are ready to deploy Office 2010. Give us five hours, and you will have a clear understanding of the tools, tips and tricks you need now to jumpstart the successful deployment and management of your Windows desktop environment today. Come join members of the Windows and Office US Product Teams, as well as local Microsoft Technology Evangelists for technical training, professional networking, and real world guidance.
Don’t miss your chance to be there and meet the TechNet gang, register today.
For the latest updates follow us on Twitter, @MSSpringboard