IE7 and You
New IE7 Shakes Up CMS and Portal Implementations
by Tony Byrne and Janus Boye
31-Oct-2006 --
When Microsoft releases a major new version to a browser that still boasts 80-85% market share, web managers around the world need to take note. The good news is that Internet Explorer 7 ("IE7") is more standards compliant than its predecessor, but like all browsers, it has its own bugs and foibles. Perhaps more importantly, it is not IE6, a finicky browser for which software developers had developed special work-arounds, which may now break or need revision under the successor version.
As usual, this problem has both publisher and customer dimensions:
- Will IE7 affect the administrative and editorial capabilities of your CMS and Portal?
- Will IE7 muck up the rendered sites themselves?
IE7 cometh
IE7 has been available in beta since Spring, 2006. However, early versions were buggy, and seemingly many vendors did not test it seriously. But Microsoft fixed nearly all the bugs and in mid-October made a release candidate available for download while making noises about installing IE7 automatically through its notorious "AutoUpdate" service. Used infrequently in enterprise settings, AutoUpdate is a common service among home and small business computers running Windows.
Portal and CMS developers have been scrambling ever since. Noted one CMS vendor in an e-mail to us, "We were a little surprised at the schedule, having assumed it would be released a bit later. With the AutoUpdate, you really can't afford to wait!"
Already, recriminations are flying. Complained a senior developer at a systems integrator that implements numerous CMS and portal packages, "It is unacceptable that a product vendor did not test and update applications for the IE7 release -- stable IE7 candidate releases have been out for months."
Some vendors have countered privately that IE7 has been a moving target, with too much risk in releasing patches or updates against a final version whose features and bugs remained up in the air.
What can go wrong
What are the potential problems that IE7 could pose to web-based software? Let's run down a short list of known issues.
Active X
Many commercial CMS packages still use ActiveX controls -- either as rich text editors or as the entire interface itself. All these products need to be updated. Among other things, Microsoft's new security emphasis mandates an "opt-in" approach where ActiveX controls need to be re-registered and perhaps re-installed under new security settings (See "CrownPeak," below). Also, vendors have had to modify some features of the controls themselves.
CSS
This is the big one. IE7 fixes most (though not all) of the bugs in CSS standards support (see the IE blog for more). This is a very good thing, but creates problems when applications do not upgrade existing work-arounds for the CSS deficiencies of IE6. This is particularly the case when browser sniffers look for "IE6 or greater" and serve a mangled page.
Brice Dunwoodie of Cylogy and CMSWire offers an example of the problem:
"Previously you could do something like this:
/* All Browsers, including IE6 */
.mystyle {<something>}
/* Gecko Browsers, ignored by IE6 */
html>body .mystyle {<something slightly different>}
IE7 picks-up both CSS rules now. So if layout, etc. was dependent on IE not reading the second one, then IE7 may 'break' things."
In the past few years, more portal and CMS interfaces have become CSS-driven, so this could become a major support challenge.
Unknowns
At the end of the day, no one knows quite what IE7 will do to an application until they test it. Based on past experience, heavy use of DHTML and JavaScript could present glitches, though few concrete problems have emerged to date.
Because of the relative dearth of testing thusfar among commercial product vendors, it is customers -- perhaps initially with staff working from home -- who will eventually expose incompatibilities.
Your Application Interface
Indeed, many vendors don't plan to formally certify and support IE7 until their next dot-release or service pack and are recommending that customers delay internal deployment of IE7.
Let's look at how some vendors are dealing with the issue. Note: the fact that your vendor isn't listed here doesn't mean they are not addressing IE7; this is a random sampling.
BEA
BEA is just now started testing IE7 and has not made an official support statement yet. However, the company told us that its AquaLogic User Interaction Portal plans to support IE7 in the first half of next year.
CrownPeak
As a hosted service, CrownPeak can more easily modify interfaces since the vendor controls the environment itself. The main challenge for CrownPeak was its authoring interface, based in part on an ActiveX control. Specifically, CrownPeak had to send guidance to all its customers with instructions and screenshots for re-registering the controls as trusted components in IE7.
Changing security settings in IE7
to support access to a CrownPeak admin interface -- Source: CrownPeak
Ektron
Ektron has a double challenge here, because in addition to its own CMS, the company sells an ActiveX-based rich text editor called eWebEditPro that many other vendors embed in their own products. Beginning in September, Ektron has released beta versions of a new editor, and several days ago issued a release candidate of a minor upgrade to its ActiveX control. Other vendors who OEM eWebEditPro are still waiting on a production release of the widget, and even then, those vendors will need to modify their use of the editor.
e-Spirit
German CMS vendor e-Spirit tells us that they have not officially certified IE7, but that during first tests no problems appeared. Still e-Spirit will not officially support IE7 in the current version of its CMS, FIRSTspirit 3.1. Official support will have to await FIRSTspirit 4.0, due out early 2007.
Ingeniux
US-based Ingeniux is another CMS vendor that uses ActiveX in its UI. According to one customer it doesn't work in IE7:
"Ingeniux does some browser sniffing before it attempts to install the ActiveX components. I do not have IE7 installed on my machine (of course), but a couple of IT folks tried it while I watched, and it would not work."
Shannon McKinney, Ingeniux Director, Higher Education Solutions, says that the company has released a "beta" service patch for IE7 support. She adds, "We continue to test for IE7 upgrade issues and have only identified minor irregularities. Although performance has been good and we have been using IE7 in production for over a month, we are not yet recommending that customers update to IE7 in business critical environments until we issue the 'gold version' of the IE7 update and complete testing."
Interwoven
Interwoven's TeamSite CMS is a broadly deployed package around the world. According to Sunil Menon, Director of Product Management, WCM, "TeamSite 6.7.1 just shipped a couple of weeks ago, and it is not officially supported on IE7 because we shipped before the formal release of IE7." However, Interwoven's own testing suggests that the main challenge revolves around the editor control that TeamSite OEMs from Ektron. "I would suspect that realistically, our official support for IE7 will be possible with TeamSite 6.7.1 SP1," adds Menon.
RedDot
RedDot has been testing since early beta releases of IE7. According to one integrator, RedDot's "SmartEdit" had significant problems under IE7 but the company supplied a recent patch that addressed the issues.
Serena
Serena Collage sports a very AJAXy interface and therefore is at some risk of DHTML or JavaScript hiccups. "Although we are still testing IE7 as part of our QA process, we have not encountered any issues at this point -- as of now it looks like there will be no code changes in order to support IE7," says Tim Zonca Senior Product Marketing Manager for Operations Process Management.
Nevertheless, like many other vendors, Serena will not officially support IE7 until its next release of Collage, scheduled for early February 2007, although Zonca says the company continues to test, and will address any problems that might arise.
Sun
In an e-mail, Sun says that they plan to support IE7 in their Java System Portal package, but the company does not plan to certify IE7 officially until the next portal product release in 2007.
Synkron
Danish CMS vendor Synkron has been refreshingly open on its public support blog about the shortcomings of its Via product with IE7. To make a long story short, certain slick new features (like drag and drop) in Via don't work yet with IE7. The company is working on a fix.
TerminalFour
Irish CMS vendor TerminalFour recently completed testing its product under IE7 and found no major issues. "Overall we have found IE7 to be well behaved," wrote a company spokesperson, who added:
The only minor issue for us was to do with screen sizes. When you create a new "menu-less" window, IE adds an address bar to the window (I presume to avoid fraud as you can see the web address!). The problem is that it doesn't calculate this as part of the size. For example if you created a 200x200 window, it now uses the top 30 pixels for the menu bar so therefore only giving you 170 pixels to work with. Anyway it was only a small issue, and found very early on, and was corrected in a build of our software issued earlier this summer.
This is not an exhaustive list but just a representative sampling of vendors. And kudos to those sharing publicly what they are doing. If you are a customer with information to pass along about your implementation, please let us know, and we'll update this article from time to time.
Rendered Pages
Thus far, we've just been talking about the admin and editorial UI. But what about the actual pages on your website or portal? You could face challenges in particular if your if your CMS or portal autogenerates any mark-up, JavaScript, or CSS.
Canadian integrator non-linear creations recently sent an advisory to its customers about a variety of minor bugs to look out for in published pages, including hitches with mouseover behavior, background image display, and centered pages.
Blogger Christopher Hester has catalogued a list of bugs, many though, stemming from IE7's new zoom feature.
Lessons Learned
What lessons can we all draw from this?
First, your software vendors may not be up-to-speed on IE7, so budget time and resources to test interfaces yourself. Don't be surprised if IE7 compatibility will force you to upgrade to a new version of your server software. Are you prepared to do that?
Second, unlike even 5 years ago, more employees expect to be able to access enterprise information systems from home -- often from personal equipment -- which means that enterprises need to account for newer browser versions long before they are adopted officially within the firewall.
Finally, let's take a moment to acknowledge that major browser releases are a big deal for web editors as well as readers, especially as web application interfaces and websites themselves become more sophisticated. Several years ago during the browser wars, vendors and buyers alike got used to dealing with significant new browser versions. This experience now seems forgotten.
Even browser changes designed to align with standards can cause disruptions. Nearly all observers agree that IE7 is much better behaved than IE6, and some slashdotters are even calling IE7 "Microsoft FireFox." But Brice Dunwoodie cautions, "I think the real pain is moving forward from this point with new releases, as people now must support Firefox, IE7, and a badly behaved IE6."