During 2012 we built a significant number of enhancements and improvements into the Service Desk Web Access platform, Our work during 2013 and beyond continues on this path providing our customers with more new and valuable features delivered into the browser for both the analyst (as Web Desk) and the end user (as Self Service). These new and future features are made possible through the recent advances in modern browser technology that we see in Internet Explorer 9, 10, Firefox, Chrome and Safari.
We knew from your feedback that some customers are still supporting the use of the 'legacy browsers' Internet Explorer v7 and v8. In those organisations it is seems this is either due to the continued use of XP, and/or the restrictions of other old products which support only legacy browser usage. Recognizing this situation for some of our customers, we planned carefully to ensure we could deliver the advantages of modern browser abilities to all our customers – including those still using these legacy browsers. So with Service Desk v7.6 and above we enabled modern browser behaviour for the legacy browsers through the use of the 'Google Chrome Frame' add-in for IE7 and IE8.
Microsoft support for Windows XP also ceases on 8th April 2014. There will be no more security patches from Microsoft and from that point XP becomes an increased security risk for any organisation still using it in operation. This article : http://www.troyhunt.com/2013/01/the-impending-crisis-that-is-windows-xp.html provides a good description of the challenge that exists for software vendors and for all corporate IT management from the combination of legacy browsers, the need for modern product features, and the impending end of life for XP.
Recently Google announced that they plan to cease maintenance and updates of Google Chrome Frame from the start of 2014. As Google explained "Today, most people are using modern browsers that support the majority of the latest web technologies. Better yet, the usage of legacy browsers is declining significantly and newer browsers stay up to date automatically, which means the leading edge has become mainstream" - That full announcement is here: http://blog.chromium.org/2013/06/retiring-chrome-frame.html. Note that Google Chrome Frame still remains usable, and available for organisations to download and distribute internally, but the on-line public version hosted by Google will no longer be available from that date, and no further updates are planned.
In light of this, I wanted to be clear that here at LANDesk we remain focussed on ensuring that LANDesk Service Desk customers can continue to use IE7 and IE8 with Service Desk beyond January 2014. This may mean we bundle Google Chrome Frame with Service Desk in a patch, or provide the ability to install it dynamically from an alternative public location. Whichever solution our investigations conclude is best will be made available for those 7.6.x customers that use IE7 and IE8 in good time well before the end of 2013. On Premise customers will not need to perform an upgrade to the latest version of Service Desk as the solution can be applied into your current 7.6.x installation. SaaS customers will be updated and maintained as usual through Cloud Operations. Watch the LANDesk community for announcements on this later this year.
We are watching the situation regarding the end of support of XP with interest, and hearing great feedback from our customers on this and the challenges of other products demanding ongoing use of legacy browsers.
What is your business doing about Windows XP and legacy browsers? We'd love to hear your experiences – please do add your comments below.
Ian Aitchison
Product Director - LANDesk Service Desk