With its legacy browser set to be officially retired on June 15, Microsoft is now encouraging organizations to avoid waiting until the last moment to stop using Internet Explorer.
In a recent blog post on the software giant’s Tech Community page, senior product manager for hardware Eric Van Aelstyn recommended that businesses still using IE should set their own retirement date instead.
Consumers and most businesses have now moved on to Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome or other modern browsers but some organizations still rely on IE to access certain sites. While Microsoft has repeatedly warned businesses that IE will be officially retired this year, not all companies were proactive enough to come up with a plan to transition to another browser yet.
Thankfully though, there’s still time and organizations don’t have to wait until June 15 to migrate away from IE.
Saying goodbye to IE once and for all
In his post, Aelstyn points out that “waiting for something to happen can be stressful, especially with complex IT environments” which is why Microsoft is encouraging companies to take action now by scheduling their own internal retirement date.
To prepare for IE’s retirement, organizations should ensure that IE mode is set up in Edge to allow their employees to access IE-dependent sites going forward.
At the same time, they should also inform their users about the change and have them import their data. This can be easily done by copying and pasting edge://settings/importData into Edge’s address bar and then choosing “Microsoft Internet Explorer” from the selection options under “Import from”.
Finally, organizations should broadly deploy the Disable IE policy on their internal retirement date. With IE mode in Edge, everything should work as usual just in Microsoft’s modern browser as opposed to in its legacy browser.
Even with these recommendations, June 15 could be quite a hectic day for organizations that have not prepared accordingly for IE’s retirement.
Via Windows Central
