In today’s blog I want to discuss about that occasional need to use an older version of Internet Explorer. I know that some of you might read this and think “who the heck needs an older version of IE?”, but believe me I must be asked this every other week – I do not kid you!
It all comes down to one thing: unavoidable business web apps that did not evolve as quickly as Microsoft spits out new versions of IE.
I know some of you worked around this by installing an older version of Chrome or Firefox and that worked just fine. But it might happen that some of your users absolutely need to access this very old government web site and nothing else but IE7 works. You’ve already migrated everyone to IE10 and even started to roll out IE11, but this site must be access by these 15-20 users – there’s just no way around this. I say “government web site” because it happens that many of their infrastructures are known to be outdated and don’t update very quickly for a multitude of reasons – but I could as well have said the same thing about some in-house development or some supplier provided product that stalled in its evolution, and you have to somehow make do with it, no matter what you think of it.
No 2 versions of Internet Explorer can co-exist on one single machine (I know, Duh!), and it’s well known that using AppV to virtualize any version of Internet Explorer is a shot in the dark. Microsoft also states that you cannot do it, and if you happen to make it work (I know some people have made it worked to a certain extent), forget about any form of support from them! So what do you do? You roll back Internet Explorer versions on those user’s PCs until you get that site working as you want? That’s certainly feasible but these users will mostly miss out or behave poorly with other more recent web sites.
There are different options for you, depending of what your infrastructure is made of: RDP, Citrix, rollback to a different version of IE for users who absolutely need it, but did you consider a “Spoon Server”?
I was first made aware of the product Spoon (spoon.net) by Rory Monaghan (@Rorymon), a fellow blogger. Please go check his most-excellent blog, if you don’t know him already, at http://www.rorymon.com/blog/.
Spoon (http://spoon.net) is a rather new company that developed a small client utility to connect to their online repository of pre-virtualized apps – and it all happens in the cloud! Nothing else but the Spoon plugin to install on your Windows PC and you can even access many applications absolutely free of charge – check out their public repository of apps at https://spoon.net/hub/. For a few dollars a month, you can also access private repositories of applications, most particularly what they call the “Browser Sandbox Repository” (https://spoon.net/browsers) where you will find a very impressive list of browsers and versions. This is particularly useful to web app developers that wish to test their app against different browsers.
More recently, Spoon came out with its Spoon Server product for companies that wish to operate within a more private context (aka: not from the cloud). This solution is a bit more expensive than the cloud version one, but can possibly answer your user’s needs should they require to handle sensitive data using the virtualized apps.
Installing and maintaining a Spoon Server solution is quite straight forward:
- Start by downloading the latest version of Spoon Server from https://spoon.net/server and install it on a Windows Server 2008/2008 R2/2012.
- Make sure you have ports 80, 81 and 443 opened on that server for users to stream applications, and for you to manage the Spoon Server remotely;
- Create user accounts or use the LDAP option to connect to your enterprise’s Active Directory;
- Download and publish and the virtualized application needed from spoon.net (also referred to as “containers” or “.svm files”);
- Download and install the Spoon plugin on the Windows PC that need it and configure it to connect to your Spoon Server;
- Configure which user account will access which virtualized application;
…and you’re done!
patrick@softomatic.ca
514-992-6442
image: Festival Montréal En Lumières
February 16th to March 1st 2015
web site: http://www.montrealenlumiere.com/home.aspx