New Zealand IE8 Taskforce : Tips and Tricks

Group Policy Settings Reference Windows Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1

nzie8 — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 03:08:13 GMT

Hi All,

This spreadsheet lists the policy settings for computer and user configurations included in the administrative template files (admx/adml) delivered with Windows Internet Explorer 8. The policy settings included in this spreadsheet cover Internet Explorer 5, Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8. These files are used to expose policy settings when you edit Group Policy objects (GPOs) using Group Policy Object Editor (also known as GPEdit).

System Requirements

Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2; Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 x64 Edition; Windows Server 2008; Windows Vista; Windows Vista Service Pack 1; Windows XP Professional x64 Edition ; Windows XP Service Pack 2; Windows XP Service Pack 3

This update applies to Internet Explorer 8 RC1 with the following operating systems:

Windows XP SP2
Windows XP SP3
Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2
Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 x64 Edition
Windows Server 2008
Windows Vista
Windows Vista Service Pack 1

Click here to download.

Nick.

Internet Explorer Administration Kit 8 Release Candidate 1

nzie8 — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 02:48:19 GMT

Hi All,

The Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) 8 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) simplifies the creation, deployment and management of customized Internet Explorer 8 packages. IEAK 8 can be used to configure the out-of-box Internet Explorer 8 experience or to manage user settings after Internet Explorer 8 deployment.

Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) 8 RC1 enables the most efficient way to deploy Internet Explorer 8 and manage Web-based solutions. Learn how to tailor a custom browser to meet your customers' needs. Visit the IEAK 8 RC1 site on TechNet for more information on the Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) 8 RC1.

Please note: You must have Internet Explorer 8 RC1 installed on your computer in order for IEAK 8 RC1 to run successfully.

To download and understand the system requirements, visit here.

Nick.

Customising Internet Explorer 8 to Drive Users to Your Website

nzie8 — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 01:45:22 GMT

Hi All,

Nigel Parker from our developer and platform team in New Zealand has put together an excellent blog post on how to leverage some of the new features and functionality in IE8 to drive and enhance the experience users have with websites. Nigel has put together a collection of sample code and examples that the community can build on and leverage, to provide real value and a richer user experience for those using Internet Explorer 8.

In September we were fortunate to have Matt Heller over from the IE Team to deliver a roadshow across New Zealand to raise awareness and address questions and concerns that customers may have with the new version of our browser platform. We recorded our Auckland presentation, so if you weren’t able to attend, or you’d like a refresher, please check out the video online.

We have a wealth of resources available on our NZ IE8 Website, NZIE8 blog and the IE Team Blog so do check them out.

For the full details on Nigel’s examples and demos, see this blog post - http://blogs.msdn.com/nigel/archive/2008/11/13/customising-ie8-to-drive-users-to-your-website.aspx.

Nick.

IE8 Group Policy

nzie8 — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:30:55 GMT

Hi All,

For those of you who might be new to Group Policy, here is a quick background. Let’s first assume you use an Active Directory environment to administer the computers in your corporate network. If that is the case, Group Policy provides a wide set of policy settings to manage IE8 after you have deployed it to your users' computers. These settings are locked down and cannot be changed by users, as they are always written to a secure tree in the registry.

The IE Group Policy node in GPEdit.msc (GPEdit.msc is one of the tools used to configure Group Policies):

Group Policy allows you to create IE (and other software) configurations as a part of Group Policy objects (GPOs). The GPOs are linked to hierarchical Active Directory containers such as sites, domains, or organizational units. A client-side extension ensures that your policies are applied and refreshed regularly.

Tools

You might be wondering how to configure Group Policy? All the tools to configure create, manage, view, and troubleshoot GPOs are provided in your Windows operating system. Please check the Windows Server Group Policy site to find a list of the tools that are built into your OS.

The IE8 Deployment Guide, a very important resource itself, is now updated to include content for IE8 Beta 2. For instance, as there are more than a thousand IE GPs, configuring these policies for the first time may seem like a daunting task for a new IT Professional. For this very reason, the Group Policy section of the Deployment Guide has been updated to include recommended Group Policy settings for security, performance and compatibility with IE6 and IE7.

Group Policy support in IE8

In IE8, we have added more than 100 new Group Policies, bringing the total Group Policies supported in IE8 to 1300! Virtually all new IE8 features have Group Policy support, whether it is Compatibility View, Accelerators, or InPrivate Browsing Mode. These policies allow administrators to fully control IE8 features: hide the feature completely, preset the default, lock the user to only use the defaults, etc. For example, an administrator could turn off InPrivate Browsing by enabling the Turn off InPrivate Group Policy.

We understand that organizations have different needs. We provided extra granularity in the form of additional policies, so that features can easily be configured to best suit your needs. For instance, Compatibility View has five Group Policies:

Turn off Compatibility View
Turn off Compatibility View button
Turn on Internet Explorer 7 Standards Mode
Turn on Internet Explorer Standards Mode for Local Intranet
Use Policy List of Internet Explorer 7 sites

As an example, if you are confident all your internal line of business applications and web sites work best with IE8, you can enable Turn on Internet Explorer Standards Mode for Local Intranet Group Policy. This will overwrite the intranet standards mode to be IE8. As usual, each policy comes with descriptive explain text that allows you to fully understand what the policy has been designed to do.

The Explain Text for Turn on Internet Explorer Standards Mode for Local Intranet Group Policy:

IE8 plays an important role in helping protect users against a range of attacks by offering new security features like the SmartScreen Filter, Data URI and Encryption support. All of these security features are GP enabled so the administrator can ensure their users are safe and secure in corporate environments.

Based on the feedback we received from customers, we have Group Policy enabled some of the legacy settings like secondary home pages, something that wasn’t available in IE7. We’ve also given extensive Group Policy support for the Favorites Bar and Command Bar; an administrator now has firm control over how the IE UI will look.

We have refined our Group Policy support in this release and look forward to your feedback once you’ve had a chance to try it out.

source

IE8 Tab Grouping

nzie8 — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:29:02 GMT

EVOLUTION OF THE DESIGN AND ALGORITHM

After shipping Internet Explorer 7, the IE team collected data from user reviews, from IE Feedback on MS Connect, and from other Microsoft product teams. We formed a list of top user requests which included the new Reopen Closed Tab feature, the new tab Crash Recovery feature, work to ensure that a bad tab would not hang the other tabs, the new Duplicate Tab feature, and many others. That list also includes the following two observation: Today, a tab that is opened from another tab is always put at the end of the tab row. Since it is related to the first tab, it is odd that one has to go searching all the way at the end of the tabs to find it.

Based on this feedback, we decided to rework the tab close algorithm so that tab selection is not always placed to the right when a tab is closed, but it is placed on a tab related to the recently closed tab, to get the following behavior:

In addition to listening to different IE Feedback channels, we worked with user researchers here at Microsoft to hold Usability Studies in which users came in, browsed the web, and explained why and how they were accomplishing their browsing tasks.

During these usability studies, we found a few interesting trends:

Users queue up a set of tabs. In other words, users will search for something and open up a handful of the search results to read later. This trend also happens with online news sites; users queue up a set of articles they’d like to read later.
Users use one window to handle multiple tasks (i.e. I have 4 tabs open on work-related sites, 3 tabs for news articles I want to read later, and 3 tabs for restaurants I’d like to take my mother to when she visits)
After switching from another application, users frequently spend a lot of time looking for a specific tab

In the trends described above, the related tabs (whether they are search results or news articles opened from the same website) would ideally not only be placed adjacent to one another but would also have some visual indication of being grouped together so that different tasks could be more easily identifiable. This is when colors came in to play.

The idea behind tab grouping is that tabs originating from the same source are grouped together. The image below shows MSNBC with two articles from it opened in green, and a Windows Live search on Seattle restaurants with two search results from it opened in blue:

Now with visual indicators on my tabs, I can quickly identify the groups of tabs that are related to different tasks. So if I am switching back to Internet Explorer after using another application, I will quickly identify the blue-colored tabs as information related to the hunt for a good restaurant.

Another important aspect of designing this feature was deciding upon the visual indicators for groups. A common question we get is “How do color blind users use tab grouping?” We made sure to include these users in our design. The difference between the colors below is great enough that many color blind users can differentiate between the different groups:

In addition, for users who have a screen reader running, we include names of the tab groups (i.e. Tab Group 1, Tab Group 2) on each of the tabs after the title. The picture below shows the two tab groups and the tooltip on the fourth tab containing the tab group information:

Now that you know a little bit about the design of tab groups, I will explain how tab groups are created and what you can do with them.

HOW IS A TAB GROUP CREATED?

If, for example, you're viewing a newspaper website, and would like to queue up some articles to read, there are a few ways in which you can open these articles (links to articles) in new tabs and keep them grouped:

Right-click on a link and select the “Open in New Tab” option
Ctrl-click on a link
Middle-click on a link (The middle-click can be done by either by pressing the mouse scroll-wheel, or if your mouse does not have a middle button/scroll-wheel, simply right and left-click at the same time)

In addition, if you right-click on a specific tab and select the “Open a New Tab” option, a new tab will open up and will be grouped with the aforementioned source tab.

If you do any of the above in IE8, the original tab and all tabs opened up from it will be grouped.

WHAT CAN I DO WITH TAB GROUPS?

If you accidentally close a tab within a group, using the new “Reopen Closed Tab” option in the menu will not only restore that recently closed tab, but will also restore that tab into the right group.

Also, when you have completed a task, tab grouping now makes it easier to close everything related to that task by allowing a one click “Close this Tab Group” option in the tab context menu.

If you would rather have a tab not be associated with the other tabs in the group, you can easily “Ungroup This Tab”.

All of these options are available in the context menu that appears if you right-click on a tab:

In addition to the right-click context menu options, users can drag and drop tabs. Although the main appeal of this feature is that it works seamlessly in the background (there is no work on the user’s side to get this enhanced tab functionality), there are a couple of us who like to over-organize. For the over-organizers out there, dragging tabs into an existing group will make them part of that group. In addition, you can ungroup a tab by dragging it between two un-grouped tabs.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Why does the tab stay in the group if I navigate to another page on that tab?

If you are using a specific tab to navigate, the algorithm assumes that your new destination is somehow related to the group. If you don’t want the new navigation to be part of the group, you can either ungroup the tab, or open a new tab to navigate.

Why does duplicating a tab not group the two identical tabs together?

The new duplicate tab feature (found in the right click context menu for tabs) allows you to take the same tab down a completely different path. So although the tabs are identical, the idea is that the user wants to take them in two different directions.

Why are my home pages not grouped together?

Similar to the response above for duplicating a tab, the home pages usually consist of your mail client, your online newspaper, etc. They are not usually related (except that you’d like them all to open when you start the browser).

How can I turn Tab Grouping off?

From the “Tools” button in the Command Bar select “Internet Options”. Select the “Settings” button under Tabs. Uncheck the “Enable Tab Groups” setting.

I hope the content above not only provides a bit of background into the evolution of this feature but also is informative in explaining what you can do with tab grouping.

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Internet Explorer Administration Kit 8 Beta

nzie8 — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 06:40:19 GMT

The Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) 8 Beta simplifies the creation, deployment and management of customized Internet Explorer 8 packages. IEAK 8 can be used to configure the out-of-box Internet Explorer 8 experience or to manage user settings after Internet Explorer 8 deployment.

Overview

Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) 8 Beta enables the most efficient way to deploy Internet Explorer 8 and manage Web-based solutions. Learn how to tailor a custom browser to meet your customers' needs. Visit the IEAK 8 Beta site on TechNet for more information on the Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) 8 Beta.
Please note: You must have Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 installed on your computer in order for IEAK 8 Beta to run successfully.

System Requirements

Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2; Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 x64 Edition; Windows Server 2008; Windows Vista; Windows Vista Service Pack 1; Windows XP Professional x64 Edition ; Windows XP Service Pack 2; Windows XP Service Pack 3

Refer Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 System Requirements

Visit the IEAK 8 Beta site on TechNet for more information on the Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) 8 Beta.

You can download the IE Administration Kit here.

Slipstreaming IE8

nzie8 — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 06:36:03 GMT

IE8 can now be slipstreamed into Vista and Window Server 2008 OS images. If you manage the desktop images for your organization, slipstream saves you time by simplifying the task of adding Internet Explorer 8 and any IE updates. If you’re adding Internet Explorer 7 to a Windows XP image you’ll typically install XP and then add IE7 before capturing the image -this can take 2 hours! With IE8 and Windows Vista, you are able to integrate IE8 into the image file of the original operating system in about 15 minutes. No more booting the OS image, manually installing IE and re-capturing the image. The slipstreaming support also extends to IE8 cumulative updates and language packages. Slipstreaming IE8 into an OS image will only be supported on Vista and Windows Server 2008 platforms. Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 do not currently offer a solution for slipstreaming Windows components, which are built using update.exe.

Here are the steps to create a Vista image with IE8 being the out of box browser by default. You can try this yourself with IE8 beta1.

Preparation

1. Install Windows Automated Install Kit

The Windows Automated Install Kit (WAIK) is a tool available for Vista and Windows Server 2008 to manage and customize OS images. This is the tool you’ll be using to slipstream IE8. Download a version of WAIK that matches your local machine configuration (not the image you’ll be slipstreaming IE8 into).

Note: Using a WAIK x64 bit version for a Vista x86 image will not work. For more information, please refer to the WAIK Readme.

2. Create the Vista directory

Copy the Vista directory from the CD onto your local machine.

3. Create 3 temp folders: Mount, Pkg, Sandbox

You can name each folder whatever you want, however remember the purpose of each folder created.

For this example, I created:

c:\slipstreaming\mount
c:\slipstreaming\pkg
c:\slipstreaming\sandbox.

Your final folder structure should look something like this:

4. Download IE8 Beta 1

Download IE8 Beta2 to your local machine from here. For this example, I saved the IE8 Beta2 exe in c:\Slipstreaming\IE8x86en

5. Extract and expand the MSU file

From the IE8 exe file:

To extract the MSU, in the command prompt run this <IE8.exe path> /x: <folder you want the MSU to be placed>. For example: c:\Slipstreaming\IE8x86en\IE8-WindowsVista-x86-enu.exe /x: c:\Slipstreaming\IE8x86en
To expand the MSU, in the command prompt run this expand.exe <path to the IE8.MSU> -F:* <pkg folder>. For example: expand.exe c:\Slipstreaming\IE8x86en\IE8.MSU -F:* c:\Slipstreaming\pkg

Slipstream

1. Mount the Vista install image to your temporary location.

In the command prompt, run this imagex.exe /mountrw install.wim <imagenumber> <mountfolder>

For this example: I am slipstreaming IE8 into Vista Ultimate which has the imagenumber = 4. The command I ran is as such "C:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\x86\imagex.exe" /mountrw C:\Slipstreaming\VistaSP1x86en\sources\install.wim 4 C:\Slipstreaming\mount

If you don’t know the image number of the OS image you are using, you can use the arbitrary large number instead of 4 in the command above like this: imagex.exe /dir c:\VistaRTM\sources\install.wim 20. This triggers help information to be displayed. From the output in your command prompt, choose the SKU that you are using and the IMAGE INDEX is the <imagenumber> that you need.

2. Slipstream IE8 into the Vista image.

If you are using Vista Gold image, you need to change a read only attribute flag prior to executing a slipstream command: attrib -R "<mountfolder>\Windows\Offline Web Pages"

For example: attrib -R "C:\Slipstreaming\mount\Windows\Offline Web Pages"

Now, you are ready to slipstream IE8. Run this in the command prompt: pkgmgr.exe /n:<package folder>\WindowsVista-KB#-NEUTRAL.xml /o:”<mount folder>;<mount folder>\windows” /s:<sandbox> /l:<where you want the log file to be stored>. Ensure the pkgmgr.exe you use is the one installed with the WAIK tools.

For example: "c:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\x86\Servicing\pkgmgr.exe" /n:"c:\Slipstreaming\pkg\Windows6.0-KB944036-x86.xml" /o:""c:\Slipstreaming\mount";"c:\Slipstreaming\mount\windows"" /s:"c:\Slipstreaming\sandbox" /l:"c:\Slipstreaming\slp.log"

Once the slipstreaming command is finished successfully, the slp.log will say “exit code 0x00”.

Remember to add the read only attribute flag back after slipstreaming is complete if using a Vista Gold image: attrib +R "<mountfolder>\Windows\Offline Web Pages"

For example: attrib +R "C:\Slipstreaming\mount\Windows\Offline Web Pages"

3. Save the changes.

Use imagex.exe to save the changes: imagex /commit /unmount <mountfolder>

For this example: "c:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\x86\imagex.exe" /commit /unmount c:\Slipstreaming\mount

You are all done!!! The Vista install image on your local machine is the new Vista build with IE8 slipstreamed.

Since IE8 is part of the Vista image, you can customize it by creating an answer.xml file and running Vista setup with unattend option as such: <VistaPath>\setup.exe /unattend:<answer.xml path>

The Unattended Windows install option enables customization of the OS install, and the answer.xml file provides the “answers” for customizations and drives the unattended install.

You can find more about unattend installs and answer files here:

Unattended Documentation (This documentation is also included in the WAIK)
IE Settings customizable via unattend

After you install the final image, IE8 beta2 will appear under installed updates as such and can be uninstalled in the same way as when installing IE8 standalone.You will be reverted to IE7 if you choose to uninstall IE8.

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