IE 7 officially released and CRM support

Posted by Mike Snyder on November 8, 2006  |  Comments (0)

In the past few weeks, Microsoft officially released Internet Explorer 7. I had downloaded and played with a beta version a few months ago and even though it worked fine with Microsoft CRM I had some browsing issues with other websites that I use frequently such as Newsgator. Consequently, I uninstalled IE 7 and decided to wait for the official release...and that time is now!

The first thing you will notice after you install IE 7 is that everything is "fuzzy". Microsoft calls this ClearType, but I call it fuzzy. They claim it is better for users and easier to read but I don't get it. It is also frustrating that I disabled ClearType on the operating system level, but IE overrides the Windows XP setting and turns it back on. Therefore I immediately dug through the IE menus to figure out where to disable ClearType again (Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced -> disable the Always use ClearType for HTML). Ahh, much better.

Then of course I tried to browse to a Microsoft CRM site. At this point, you will get this prompt.

If you say yes, it will close the original window and then you'll see that it launches a second IE window with Microsoft CRM in it. If you don't like this behavior with the second window launching you can always browse to the infamous loader.aspx page (http://<yourcrmserver>/loader.aspx). The Microsoft CRM team blog tackled this topic back in September before IE 7 was officially released. Once I was into Microsoft CRM everything seemed to work fine after playing with it for just a few minutes, but I obviously wasn't able to test the entire system from start to finish.

Out of curiousity, I contacted Microsoft CRM support with the following questions:

Is Internet Explorer 7 officially supported by Microsoft CRM 3.0? The system requirements page does not list it (http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/crm/product/systemrequirements.mspx) but we have customers asking if they can upgrade. If it isn't supported now, when should tell that it will be officially supported? If it is officially supported, would someone plus update the appropriate documentation?

 Their reply:

The documentation should be out soon. I did find a couple of tidbits for you.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 is compatible with Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP. However, to run Internet Explorer 7 correctly in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0, you may have to turn off the application mode setting for the Microsoft CRM Web site.

For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
911328 Internet Explorer 7 closes unexpectedly when you export records to Microsoft Excel in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0

The KB article they reference shows you how to turn off application mode for Microsoft CRM and it is easy enough to do. However, one thing you should consider is that the Application Mode setting is a GLOBAL configuration. Changing this value will apply to all of the users on your system, not just those running IE 7. Therefore if you have some users running IE 6 and some running IE 7 you will have to make a decision on how you want to proceed. You can not turn off application mode for just IE 7 users.

Despite the KB warnings, I tried to export records to Excel in IE 7 with Application Mode turned on and it works fine on our installation.

I was also glad to hear that Microsoft will update their system requirements list to reflect that IE 7 is officially supported with Microsoft CRM 3.0. We have fielded this IE 7 support question a few times over the past several weeks.