Announcing improvements to Enterprise Mode and Enterprise Site Discovery

As we continue to hear feedback from our customers, we are making investments in tools and features that help our customers get to Internet Explorer 11 before the January 12, 2016 support deadline. We encourage all of our customers to stay up-to-date on the latest version and to leverage features such as Enterprise Mode and Enterprise Site Discovery to do so.

Today, we’re announcing an update to Enterprise Mode and two new updates to Enterprise Site Discovery as part of the May 2015 Update.

Now supporting IE7 Enterprise Mode

Enterprise Mode can be very effective in providing backward compatibility for older Web apps. We initially released Enterprise Mode last April as a way to provide better compatibility for sites designed to run in Internet Explorer 8. In November, we expanded the functionality of the Enterprise Mode Site List to include the ability to put any Web app in any document mode, without changing a single line of code on the site.

In June 2015 we’re adding the last piece of the puzzle, by adding a new “IE7 Enterprise Mode” option which enables Enterprise Mode with Compatibility View. We’ve heard feedback from customers that some sites work best with both Enterprise Mode and Compatibility View. You could do this by adding the site to the Enterprise Mode section of the Enterprise Mode Site List in combination with the Display intranet sites in Compatibility View setting or a group policy, but this was difficult. We’re excited to announce the expansion of Enterprise Mode to natively support a single mode that includes Compatibility View and Enterprise Mode. If you put a site in IE7 Enterprise Mode, it will automatically use Enterprise Mode with IE7 document mode if there’s a DOCTYPE in the markup, or fall back to IE5 document mode if there isn’t a DOCTYPE. This higher-fidelity emulation will help customers upgrade to Internet Explorer 11 easier than ever before.

As part of this change, we are renaming the original Enterprise Mode to “IE8 Enterprise Mode” to distinguish between the two high-fidelity emulation modes. Last, “IE11 Document Mode” is replacing “Edge Mode,” to explicitly call Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 10. We will have more to share on this at Microsoft Ignite.

If you are currently using Enterprise Mode, you don’t need to make any changes to your existing site list. These new options are now available through the Enterprise Mode Site List Manager, or you can edit the XML file directly using the new schema.

Updated Enterprise Mode Site List tool

Enterprise Site Discovery XML Output and Group Policy Management

The May update adds XML as an output option that can be used exclusively or in conjunction with the existing WMI output and enables management via group policy. This update complements the March 2014 update by also bringing this functionality to IE8, IE9 and IE10.

To improve the management experience for this feature we are introducing a set of Group Policies that can be used once the feature is configured on the end point via PowerShell. We provide four Group Policies to give you control over the output of the feature in addition to the parameters for Privacy features introduced last month. These policies will ship later this summer but are available as part of the Enterprise Site discovery toolkit. You can read more about both updates on Technet.

With the XML output now available, the Enterprise Site List Manager has been updated to support bulk import of these XML files to support building of the Enterprise Mode Site List. This update will allow an IT Pro to use the output of Enterprise Site discovery to directly seed their Enterprise Mode Site List. This couples the ability to assess the problem with Enterprise Site Discovery and remediate compatibility issues with Enterprise Mode Site List by putting sites into a mode where they work.

Bulk import option for Site List manager & new Launch In options in the site list manager tool

How to get started using this update

• Download the improved Enterprise Site List Manager tool.
• Learn more about Enterprise Mode and how to turn it on.
• Download the Enterprise Site Discovery Toolkit and deploy the group policy
• Read up on Enterprise Site Discovery on Technet
• Update Internet Explorer 8, 9, 10, or 11 with the latest Cumulative updates (June 2015 or later)

We’re excited about these new improvements and encourage you to try them out! Let us know your feedback on Twitter at @IEDevChat or on Connect.

— Deen King-Smith, Program Manager
— Fred Pullen, Senior Product Marketing Manager

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 23, 2015
  Cool! But does that mean, that this new feature (IE7 Enterprise Mode) replaces the "Compatibility View Site List"? It would be great, because an IT admin don't have to maintain two site lists.

• Anonymous
  April 23, 2015
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 23, 2015
  @Fred: Thanks for explain to me. To be precise: Compatibility Mode = IE7 Enterprise Mode. I just not clear to me if this "IE7 Enterprise Mode" also change the Browser Mode (as it was in Compatibility Mode) or only the Document Mode. But I assume, both.

• Anonymous
  April 23, 2015
  strange... I have a page that WORK  if

• set to "Enterprise Mode" (by 1st Edition of ENT Manager) and ADDITIONALLY set to compatibilty mode by GPO
• set to "IE7 Document Mode" (since 2nd Edition of ENT Manager) and NO extra compatibilty mode by GPO but it do NOT work when
• set to "IE7 Ent Mode" by 3rd Edition.   (Client IE have all Patches)

• Anonymous
  April 23, 2015
  Does not work on W7 with KB3038314. EntMode7 delivers the same result as EntMode8 "Document Mode 8"

• Anonymous
  April 23, 2015
  What happens if the user manually selects "Tools...|Enterprise Mode"?  Will that enable IE8 Enterprise Mode?  Is there any way for a user to manually select IE7 Enterprise mode?

• Anonymous
  April 24, 2015
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 24, 2015
  There are two references to updates in the article that say 2014 - do you mean 2015?

• Anonymous
  April 24, 2015
  IE7 Enterprise Mode does NOT work. Document mode is IE8.

• Anonymous
  April 26, 2015
  Sorry that there's some confusion about this.   Check your Compatibility View settings.  If you have already enabled "Display intranet sites in Compatibility View," then when you enabled Enterprise Mode in the past, you were actually getting Enterprise Mode + Compatibility View for intranet sites.  Put differently, IE11 emulating IE8 (aka Enterprise Mode) also respects IE8's emulation of IE7/IE5 (Compatibility View).  This new IE7 Enterprise Mode functionality gives you the ability to specify EM+CV for certain sites, so you can eventually turn off the "Display intranet sites in Compatibility View" default as you update your intranet web apps. Choosing Enterprise Mode from the Tools drop-down menu will still get you IE8 Enterprise Mode, but you can use the F12 Developer Tools to enter browser profile = "Enterprise" and then set the document mode to IE8, IE7, or IE5 as needed. Thanks for the feedback!  Please keep it coming.  

• Anonymous
  April 26, 2015
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 26, 2015
  Testing shows the User Agent String is not the same in IE8 EM + CV versus IE7 EM IE8 EM + CV User Agent String Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E) IE7 EM User Agent String Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E) Echoing the comments above, Document Mode is set to IE8 with IE7 EM Test URL: http://whatsmyuseragent.com/ Test OS: Windows 7 64-bit with KB3038314 There is no mention of the IE7 EM change in the patch KB "Non-Security Related Fixes Included" section (support.microsoft.com/.../3038314) It would be great to see a true EM + CV option in the XML file and to have the EM options available in the tools and F12 menus side by side (EM and EM + CV)

• Anonymous
  April 26, 2015
  Correction to above post: IE8 + CV User Agent String = Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E) (same findings as Duncan who beat me to it while my post was in draft)

• Anonymous
  April 27, 2015
  Anyone figure out yet how to force the alternate reality?  I thought there was a way to implement IE 11 and default to IE 8 Emulation Mode where you have 1000 sites that are IE 8 and pending update but only 3 sites that need IE 11.  I really don't want to have to identify 1000 websites, interview everyone, figure out what sites were IE7 but in IE 8 use compatibility mode when IE 8 emulation mode works for both.  I have the latest updates, the latest site configuration.  I've been looking at XML itself, for some type of tag to force IE 8 but by default you have to add the exclusion and it then shows up as IE 8 mode.  Is there no possible way to make it emulate IE 8 Mode and the exemption process be IE 11 when 98% of the websites internal have no lifecycle process? I think I've read every post and blog at this point.  I'm hoping anyone can provide an answer.

• Anonymous
  April 27, 2015
  Hee…

• Anonymous
  April 28, 2015
  Right, others have seen this User Agent Strings already. Still MSIE 8.0 when IE7 EM is used. And then we perhaps come to the really "last piece of the puzzle", being adding a possibility to send another User Agent String, like you can do with the F12 Emulation. There are a lot of web applications that are looking at the User Agent String and still don't recognize the IE11 version. Site like Oracle, SAP, Symantec and others will then tell you that you need a newer browser... Newer than IE7 or IE5. And sometimes then block you. If you send the UAS of IE10 (by using F12 Emulation) there is no message and you can go further. It would be nice if we can use the XML-list to configure which UAS is to be used for a certain URL.

• Anonymous
  May 05, 2015
  Any news from Microsoft in this matter? The fact is, that it's obviously not working.

• Anonymous
  May 06, 2015
  May I recap - we were excited to hear that "Enterprise Mode" XML configuration file now also supports "Compatibility View Mode" (now called "IE7 Enterprise Mode" which up to now must be configured via GPO ([HKLMSOFTWAREPoliciesMicrosoftInternet ExplorerBrowserEmulationPolicyList]). With this GPO setting in place we have hundreds of websites running in IE10 and IE11 in a corporate production environment. We need a guarantee that both configurations are 100% identical. As it seems UA-string is different in both configurations (GPO: IE7, XML IE7 EM: IE8). What next?