Title: Why corporations still use IE 6

Dates: 3/20/2010

Overview: Corporations are caught in an IE traffic jam. Read on to find out why

My brother in law, Mike Harkins, is the VP of IT for Transamerica Corporation. I built and maintain his website. He called me one day to complain about images not being displayed properly. I asked what browser he was using IE6. I hit the roof. Do you have any idea what we progrmmers have to go through to accomodate IE 6? Why do you not up-grade (dummy). Remember I am talking to a corporate vice president. This is his response.

Why corporations use IE 6. By the way, I go by Gene.

Gene: We are in the insurance business which is heavily regulated.

Every word, even the location of logos, on our brochures, on our applications for policies, every document that a customer might see, has to be approved by each state government in the U.S. plus Washington D.C. That is 51 governing bodies. We have multiple products, with unique brochures and applications for each one, plus each state has us do unique things for each document. Do the arithimetic. That is 51 governing agencies times multiple documents per state per product. That means we have to maintain hundreds of documents precisely.

Because the software to do this is expensive, for the creation and maintenance of our documents, we use an old tool from a company called Document Sciences that is now owned by EMC. That tool only works on IE6. Because it reduces complexity for our support staff, we like to keep all of our desktop images consistent. We could upgrade some people to IE7, but then others would still have to have IE6 would make the workload more difficult for our people who image our PC's and provide support for our end users. We have 508 desktops plus about 120 servers that we maintain with a small staff. Thus, it is a serious consideration for us upgrading to IE7. We did not do it for "brush off" reason as you said.

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