Oracle E-Business Suite Technology

[Editor Dec 14 Update:  IE 7 is now certified with the E-Business Suite.  See Microsoft IE 7 Certified with Apps 11i.]

[Editor Update May 21, 2008:  Keith
has moved on to another team within Oracle and, sadly, is no longer an
active contributor to this blog.  Feel free to direct any questions
about his posted articles directly to Steven Chan, instead.]

After a lengthy and unintended delay, I will now begin the "last" of my
three-part series on working with pre-release browers. I would like to say I
saved the best for last, but I'll try to be more objective and say that it's
really the hardest that I saved for last: Internet Explorer 7. In
fact, it turned out to be so hard, that the issue is best divided into two
separate posts, so perhaps you haven't seen the last of this topic yet.



For this post, I'll concentrate on why you will most likely want to test Internet Explorer 7 before it is released, and how to avoid some potentially nasty surprises when it is released, and shows up overnight on every PC in your organization -- even though you told everyone not to download it on their own. As one might expect, Microsoft is eager to help you on both points, with readily available IE 7 release candidate downloads, and a highly important Blocker Toolkit to manage the incoming tide.

Bigger than Big

Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 (IE 7) is one of the most talked about
updates in browser history. Most notably, it is Microsoft's first major
update to their core browser product in nearly five years. IE 7 has promised many new features
that bring it up to parity with competing browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and
Apple Safari, but the biggest changes, despite being under the covers, will have even more of an impact in the IT department than on the users' desktops.

Microsoft is making great efforts to do a better job of adhering to web
standards, and "clean up" much of the buggy CSS and JavaScript behavior that
has been the bane of every web developer's existence. Chances are if you're reading this blog, you don't design web sites for
a living, so you may be wondering, why is this so important to you? The
answer comes in two parts.

Seeing is Believing

First off, if you customize the look and feel of any Oracle HTML-based applications, you're probably more impacted than you may know.

It's important to understand that you can't throw an HTTP request
around without hitting a website these days that doesn't have some kind of
code branch along the lines of "if IE then do this (hack-filled code), else
do this (standard code)". Microsoft is well aware of how this practice has
ballooned over the years, and because of this, they made the unusual move of
sending out an early warning to web developers and site maintainers around
the world, saying that many of these web page "hacks" will not only fail to work with IE 7, but will actually fail to render properly, yielding unintended consequences and, in some cases, totally unreadable or non-functional web pages.

This means that testing your internal web-based
applications and even helping to test vital supplier web sites is crucial to
ensure a smooth transition with IE 7 arrives. Included in that list of applications is any customizations you may have made to E-Business Suite.

Granted, it will be difficult to fully test it without certified E-Business Suite code; rest assured, we've got a headstart on our certification efforts and are working hard to keep the gap between release and certification as small as possible. In the meantime, you will probably get the best results by extracting your customized HTML code and testing it independently from the rest of the E-Business Suite code. This will also allow you to roll out your changes along with any interoperability patches we may require as quickly as possible.

Coming Soon to a PC in Front of You

The second reason for the importance of pre-release testing is that
Microsoft is sending you this new browser whether you like it or not.

Capitalizing on its popularity, and the fact that they have control over the product
as a "core component of the operating system", the new browser version will
be automatically delivered to all Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 users that have the
Automatic Updates feature configured on their desktop. Although it won't
exactly be forced on users, IT departments that have configured
their users to automatically download and install updates from
Microsoft will find that one day in the near future, quite suddenly,
everyone will have gone from running IE 6 to IE 7. (Ed. Update: This actually won't happen invisibly; customers will always have to consent to the upgrade in a pop-up window. See the followup to this article for more details.)

If you aren't sure, open up Automatic Updates from the Control Panel. If you see something configured like this:

then IE 7 will automatically be downloaded and installed to your machine. If the second bullet is selected, you will have the ability to deselect the IE 7 update before installing any other downloaded updates.

While Microsoft is simultaneously using the lure of new features and
security improvements to encourage its user base to upgrade, they are also
taking advantage of their deep OS integration to minimize the user base
running the older, outdated browser as quickly as possible. There are
certainly benefits to this approach, but the impact it will have on IT
departments and web designers around the world that have yet to clean up
their IE-specific code is nothing short of painful.

Damming the River

Before you panic, however, Microsoft has you covered. Microsoft is
offering a bone to the IT departments out there in the form of an Internet
Explorer Blocker Toolkit. This toolkit will allow you to configure your network
so that the browser update is "blocked" before it can be delivered to PCs in
your domain, until you decide your organization is ready for it.

Oracle has recently published
MetaLink
Alert 390582.1
on this topic; if you're interested in learning more about this tool, I
encourage you to check it out.

In fact, I would go so far as to recommend that everyone that
is responsible for PCs that are using Internet Explorer to access E-Business
Suite review this alert as soon as possible.

Alternatively, if you have control over automatic updates on your
machine or your network, you may want to turn off the feature that
automatically applies these patches. (If you're one of the many companies
that believes in testing automatic updates before deploying them widely,
then you're probably already doing this, and should be insulated from the
sudden change.)

Preparation Before Preparation

The upshot of all of this is that before you can prepare to test your
applications and services with the new version of Internet Explorer, you
should prepare everyone else by ensuring the update doesn't get deployed
prematurely.

Very soon, I'll discuss how you can go about testing IE 7 on your
network without getting in the way of your E-Business Suite usage. Depending
on your goal, as you'll soon find out, this turns out to be either very easy
or very hard.

• Recommended Browsers for the E-Business Suite 11i
  
• Working with Pre-Release Browser Versions
• In Depth: Try Firefox 2 Beta without Breaking EBS