In November Microsoft will release IE to the public. Microsoft has announced that IE7 will be released as a critical update in the November Tuesday Patch release. What this means to you and your organization is that on November 14th or shortly thereafter you'll be running a new browser as your default IE instance. I would highly recommend that you take advantage of the release of IE7 to download onto a machine within your organization and test all of your web applications and programs to be sure that they will continue to operate after November 14th. You can also download a tool that will let you opt out of the IE7 updates if you find problems - and you should contact your web application vendor if the update breaks important websites or applications. Similarly you should check your own website - will it operate properly under IE7? Does anything render differently or are there visual differences. If so you may want to contract with your developer now to test and fix these problems before IE7 becomes widespread.

New browsers happen all the time - but this is more than just a new browser release as - if you do nothing - you will get the updated version automatically.

I'd like to cover OS-Cubed's policy on IE7 updates, so everyone is prepared. In general, upgrading to IE7 on your client workstations is a chargeable support incident. Only Admin level users will be able to do the install - whether downloaded or through automatic updates. Manually installing IE 7, uninstalling IE7 after a problem, rolling back to IE6 - all of these are chargeable events. We anticipate that at least some users will have problems with this install. We've prepared our staff by training up on the new browser - and have discovered that it breaks a variety of features on websites. If this happens to be an important site to you there may be some action that you need to take to get access to the site, or there may be action that the web developer will need to take. We'll do our best to help you get up and running, and to support you - but remember that this browser came out just 1 week ago so we're still coming up to speed on the version as it was finally released ourselves. If a problem requires research to investigate and solve - that research time is billable and we'll do our best to be sure you're informed ahead of time about costs prior to accruing them. For websites we know for a fact that IE7 breaks the admin portion of DNN3.x so that wysiwyg editing doesn't work properly. Upgrading to Version 4.x of DNN fixes this problem and we've already sent our DNN clients quotes on doing this upgrade. We have found a number of other sites that do not work properly with IE7, so you too may find some things that break in your site. An update to make your site (either client side or admin side) IE 7 compliant is not included in your regular hosting charges. Any development to either take advantage of IE7 features, or cause the site to be IE7 compliant in any way would be a billable support incident. We have no control, nor did we have any foreknowledge of what MS would release in the final version of IE7. It may well break particular features of particular sites. We are also not testing every site we host with IE7. We recommend that you test your own site yourself - if you don't have time or technical expertise to do so we do offer custom testing services where we will exercise your site as both an every day and an admin user to determine if it works properly with IE7. Call our sales department for a quote on IE7 testing. You should also test any sites that you're currently using as part of your business process (vendor sites, b2b sites, salesforce.com, bluetie, etc.) to be sure that they're compatible before updating everyone in your office to IE7.