Microsoft Announces Improvements To Enterprise Mode And Enterprise Site Discovery

Microsoft today announced an update to Enterprise Mode and two new updates to Enterprise Site Discovery as part of the April 2015 Update.

Enterprise Mode can be very effective in providing backward compatibility for older Web apps. Last year, Microsoft released Enterprise Mode as a way to provide better compatibility for sites designed to run in Internet Explorer 8. In November, they expanded the functionality of the Enterprise Mode Site List to include the ability to put any Web app in any document mode, without changing a single line of code on the site.

Today we’re adding the last piece of the puzzle, by adding a new “IE7 Enterprise Mode” option which enables Enterprise Mode with Compatibility View. We’ve heard feedback from customers that some sites work best with both Enterprise Mode and Compatibility View. You could do this by adding the site to the Enterprise Mode section of the Enterprise Mode Site List in combination with the Display intranet sites in Compatibility View setting or a group policy, but this was difficult. We’re excited to announce the expansion of Enterprise Mode to natively support a single mode that includes Compatibility View and Enterprise Mode. If you put a site in IE7 Enterprise Mode, it will automatically use Enterprise Mode with IE7 document mode if there’s a DOCTYPE in the markup, or fall back to IE5 document mode if there isn’t a DOCTYPE. This higher-fidelity emulation will help customers upgrade to Internet Explorer 11 easier than ever before.

As part of this change, we are renaming the original Enterprise Mode to “IE8 Enterprise Mode” to distinguish between the two high-fidelity emulation modes. Last, “IE11 Document Mode” is replacing “Edge Mode,” to explicitly call Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 10. We will have more to share on this at Microsoft Ignite.

Read more about it here.