[Closed] IT question to those in "big" organisations

and I wonder how long it takes large companies to roll-out a new version.

10-15 years given how many organisations still use IE6..

ie 6 is still a mandated browser at a lot of my clients too. although some are getting onto ie7 now. lots of public sector apps that started the development life cycle 10 years ago and are now just going live force the use of old software.

IE8 iirc

Cost us €10,000's in man hours migrating apps from IE5.5 to IE6 to IE7 but at least IE7 to IE8 was minimal. Oh and these apps are JAVA - supposedly write once, run anywhere! Hahahahahahahahaah.

Held out on IE6 for a very long time.

Some of our partners kept old PCs well away from their corporate IT, running Office 97, IE5.5/IE6, etc. for several years.

Ie9 here, but the windows 7 roll out had just happened

A long time to update browsers for organisations of this size.

The biggest problem is that there are so many external and internal web based applications that either won't work or are difficult to make work with a new browser that you can't just push a new browser out and have no business impact. You may want a new browser but 2000 people over in customer will resist it massively.

I'd say a browser is the hardest thing to update on an enterprise device.

We're on 8 here but it took a long, long time and a huge amount of effort to make that happen. Approx 8000 devices.

IE 6 in several multinational companies due to intranets, but the last at least allowed the installation of other browsers for internet use.

Thanks, tis as I thought.

I've a whole load of supplier evaluation meetings in a few weeks where they'll be pitching software. Having looked at a number of their roadmaps/product plans everthing seems to be based on my client running a browser greater than IE8.

Dont know what you are all moaning about, 70,000+ desktops and laptops all running IE8 here, IE10 due to become company standard early next year. 🙂

180,000 desktops, 95% on IE6. Pain in the arse, biggest blocker in innovation.

IE6 here (IE8 available on Citrix).

LTSB were stuck on Windows 3.11 well into the 2000s.

I thought there were Browser emulators which let you run IE6 Apps inside any browser. (Sure I read an article on it in the paper, the developers made millions or were expecting to.)

IE 8 installed but never use it.
Firefox 17.0.9 again, don't use.
Chrome 30.0.1599.101 m is my browser du jour.

One of our coolest products is a suite that allows you to virtualise IE6. Knowing the public sector though it'd take 6 years and 3000 committee meetings just to decide that they'd like to run a pilot program.

Just started at a new client, big Spanish public admin, and the computer I've been given is XP with IE6. (Fortunately we can install software, just not update Windows, so I'm now using Chrome...)

IE8? Luxury!

You can run IE8 in compatibility mode which attempts to emulate IE6 but in my experience, it's far from ideal.

new client, big Spanish public admin

Presumably they're paying you up-front, right?

IE7 here (yes IE7!).

60000 laptops/desktops

*innocent question*
What are the issues (in plain English, please) with running newer browsers?
*/innocent question*

^ Critical applications built back in the day to IE6 standards. No budget/appetite to upgrade those applications.

Standard with us is Firefox 17.09

What are the issues (in plain English, please) with running newer browsers?

backwards compatibility, e.g. things that currently work in browser v1 do not work, or partly work, in v1.x

Java was touted as solving this, it didn't. Nor has anything else.

5000 desktops, IE8, WinXP (talking about Win7, not likely to be this year)

Matt .
Also it takes time to learn something to the point where you can support all the weird calls you get from end users. Been running browser X for 5 years with 10 support staff? That's 50 years support experience you're going to flush down the toilet to give the users something that they won't understand or like.

IE was notorious for not being written to any sort of open stanrards. So when people wrote web applications (like oracle financials) they wrote them to the microsoft IE standard, not the open web standard. IE started to head towards being open standards compliant in version 8-ish. As a result, the old applications didn't work correctly, so businesses had to keep everyone on IE6 until they had the time / cash / inclination to get their business-critical apps re-written.

we have a lot of councils as our clients,

majority are just making the big step from ie6 to 7.
At one them recently and then when I mentioned patching ie10 top recognise ASp.net they looked at me in horror

So what does not work? Do people run their lives from a web browser? I presume things like Office, or CRM, or design tools or specific software are *outside* of a browser usually...no?

SAP, Oracle, Anything that you wanted to write quickly and "cheaply."

IE10 is standard but we are free to use mozilla

mmm'k.
Would this explain why workplacelive that we use at work is still Win98 and old IE flava?

Word and CRM applications are fundamentally "standard" and are not customized by people, (generalization).

However your production systems, product development, internal workflows are not standard, therefore applications needed to support them are developed, either from scratch or off the shelf, to meet your needs.

The "cheapest" way to do this is place all the logic on a central server and use browsers to access this functionality, rather than having expensive clients on the desktop.

Over simplistic, but not a million miles away.

NHS - Electronic procurement? travel expenses? adverse incident reporting? email? viewing x-ray images? seeing the reports from lab tests? ordering lab tests? or x-rays now I think about it? all done in a browser. So, do people ruin their lives in a web browser? pretty much.

EDIT typo? or freudian slip?

workplacelive

Smells like an application written in-house (by the guy with the woolen tank top in IT). Re-developing that to work on a newer platform could: cost lots, take time, mean you lose all sorts of historic data.

new client, big Spanish public admin
Presumably they're paying you up-front, right?

Spain isn't [i]quite[/i] as bad as some newspapers would have you believe, it's still a way off bankruptcy.

workplacelive

Smells like an application written in-house (by the guy with the woolen tank top in IT). Re-developing that to work on a newer platform could: cost lots, take time, mean you lose all sorts of historic data.

A lot of the big companies I work with are on IE7 or 8 now. I do still come across a few places that use IE 6 but the admins normally rubbish that off and put chrome on.

IE8 & IE9.
We use virtual apps, so Firefox App-V is allowed.
And Google Chrome Frame.

Man, that was my most exciting post evah.

IE8 a recent addition here, Firefox and all other browsers blocked by policy.

If I had my way, if anyone suggests using Java in the browser for custom apps, I'll tell the to go away and come back with an idea using conventional HTML,CSS and JavaScript, combined with standard server side scripting (PHP, ASP, or something) and Postgres/Mysql/etc.

Back in the IE5.5 day our apps worked just fine in other browsers too, with just minor interpretation of menus etc. to set settings in browser.

It's not just our users, but several 100's on the project that access the same interface from shed loads of research institutes and universities etc.

On the IE6 to IE7 migration (or the MS to Sun enforced migration), we basically had to tell 80% of the users running Firefox and Safari to go find an XP machine, since only IE7/XP would be supported in future.

Had it been PHP/MySQL/JS and a pair of certificates, everything would work hunkydory on pretty much any browser you could ever imagine, and better still have an API whereby anyone could write their own custom tools in Python, Ruby, Perl, VB, and still access the same data.

Oh and when a manager mentions "COTS", I shudder.

Our place has about 300,000 employees globally and is on Win 7 IE10 - at least my 4yr old machine is.

IE 6 on most of the desktops until the win 7 Rollout starts. Lots of thin clients in our call centres which will be on Citrix which is ie 8, going to 9 during our xa65 migration.

We use approx 10 different versions of Java for various e-business oracle apps from jinit to v7. Thank fk for softgrid/appv.

HMRC deployed Browsium's "Ion" at a year or two back at a cost of £1m that enabled them to upgrade their PCs and O/S and move to IE9 but retain backward compatibility with out any re-coding of the massive number of apps that had been coded for IE6.

They claimed a £34m saving over re-coding apps which seems pretty feasible:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/04/browsium_mhrc/

Not sure why more organisations haven't taken a similar approach - it seems a reasonably low risk way of dealing with legacy.

Not just IE6 browser calls that are the problem, but getting stuffed by M$ JVM and Sun JVM not being equal, and then M$ JVM being binned and replaced with Sun one.

If I had my way, if anyone suggests using Java in the browser for custom apps, I'll tell the to go away and come back with an idea using conventional HTML,CSS and JavaScript, combined with standard server side scripting (PHP, ASP, or something) and Postgres/Mysql/etc.

Good luck doing client-side digital signing with HTML5, though.

HMRC deployed Browsium's "Ion" at a year or two back at a cost of £1m that enabled them to upgrade their PCs and O/S and move to IE9 but retain backward compatibility with out any re-coding of the massive number of apps that had been coded for IE6.

They claimed a £34m saving over re-coding apps which seems pretty feasible:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/04/browsium_mhrc/

That was the bunch I mentioned on the previous page.