Information Technology

Away from this blog, I've been putting a lot of energy into how best to work with social software in larger organizations (Enterprise 2.0) behind the firewall.  My professional attention has been shifting away from using Web content management systems, social publishing systems, and other collaboration tools on the Internet.  I really think the next big advancements and challenges for web technologies will not be on the World Wide Web,
but the less explored intranet ran by medium and larger size organizations.

In one form or another, I've been involved on both sides of the firewall in my organization. Ten years ago it was a huge challenge for
organizations and businesses to figure out how best to utilize the Internet to meet their business needs. As challenging as I saw the Internet for my own organization, I'm convinced there are greater challenges on the intranet side of the house.  For the most part, we all can see what the others are doing with their Internet Web servers, but few of us get to see what other organizations do with Enterprise 2.0 behind their own firewalls.

Microsoft has never said that they would drop support for Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) after the release of Windows XP Service Pack 3. However, I've often wondered if it would be to Microsoft's advantage, as well as beneficial to their customers, if they did drop the IE6 support. With Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) now the status quo for most non-Enterprise users of Windows and IE8 development underway, what better opportunity is there to end support for IE6 than now?

There is no question that Microsoft is supporting IE6 in the next service pack. Jane Maliouta, Microsoft's Deployment Project Manager for IE8, addressed IE6 support with XP SP3 in an IEBlog post on IE and Windows XP SP3.

XPSP3 will continue to ship with IE6 and contains a roll-up of the latest security updates for IE6. If you are still running Internet Explorer 6, then XPSP3 will be offered to you via Windows Update as a high priority update. You can safely install XPSP3 and will have an updated version of IE6 with all your personal preferences, such as home pages and favorites, still intact.

So the question remains, just how long does Microsoft plan to support this 7 year old browser? From as near as I can tell, support for Internet Explorer 6 is tied to the life cycle of the Windows XP operating system. Mainstream support for Windows XP is currently dated to end in April 14, 2009. So that means Internet Explorer 6 will have been on the desktop for more than eight years! While enterprises may take comfort that product support for Windows XP and IE6 has lasted so long, consumers and the rest of the world have since moved on with the changing world.

"There is no such thing as an ‘IT project.’ There are only business projects with an IT component."

- June Drewry, CIO of Chubb Corp as quoted in "20 Tips to Get Promoted in the Tech Industry", InfoWorld, October 16, 2006