Back in March, I attended Microsoft's "Heroes Happen {Here}" launch event in Cleveland, Ohio. Among the hype about Visual Studio 2008, ASP.NET AJAX, VSTO, and a slew of other geeky terms, there was very brief mention of a fairly well-known acronym: IE8. Yet the announcement of the upcoming release of Internet Explorer version 8, including the fact that it will be standards-compliant "out-of-the-box", struck me as one of the most important points of the day. How will the release of IE8 impact the way you view GrandView? When will IE8 be available? If it's automatically installed via Windows Update, will GrandView suddenly look wacky for no reason?
Unfortunately, we don't know exactly when IE8 will be officially released. We do know the first beta is currently available, and the second beta is supposedly to be expected in August. Upon asking a presenter at the launch event when IE8 would be released, I received the standard "sometime this year." I wouldn't be surprised if they package it as a Christmas gift.
As for how the release of IE8 will impact your viewing of GrandView, the good news is "not much." In recent years, we've been working hard to make GrandView more standards-compliant. Of course, we don't have 1,000+ people to do it like Microsoft, and we're not all the way there yet -- hence the concern that GrandView could look wacky in a standards-compliant IE8. Fortunately, this concern is alleviated by the IE team's "Don't Break the Web" implementation. Web pages designed to work with accepted W3C and CSS standards will work in IE8, but pages designed to work around previous IE "quirks" will still work, too. In my testing, GrandView looked pretty much the same in IE8 as it does in IE7; but you will have to run through our Web Client Software Requirements document (available from the Help link next to the company logo in GrandView) to make sure your IE8 settings are correct for GrandView.
IE8 boasts greater security, a redesigned Favorites bar, and two interesting new features, Activities and WebSlices. Activites provide quick access to useful web sites or functions. See the example using GrandView Contacts above, where right-clicking highlighted text allows you to instantly view a map of the selected address! WebSlices allow you to subscribe to just a portion of a web page (instead of the whole page as done with RSS) to receive notification when content is updated.
We're excited about the upcoming release of Internet Explorer 8 and will continue to keep you posted on any new developments that affect the way you use GrandView.
Jeromie Walters
GrandView Business Solutions Developer