What is the Internet Explorer Compatibility Evaluator?

The Internet Explorer Compatibility Evaluator (IECE) enables you to determine whether a Web site or Web application will have compatibility issues when used with a new version of Internet Explorer, such as Windows® Internet Explorer® 7. IECE works, by enabling compatibility logging in Internet Explorer®, parsing logged issues, and creating a log file for uploading to the ACT Log Processing Service.

You can view the compatibility issues located by IECE as a report in the Analyze screen of the Application Compatibility Manager.

Benefits of IECE

The main benefit of IECE is that it identifies potential compatibility issues between Internet Explorer® and your Web sites or Web applications before upgrading to a new version of Internet Explorer®. Early detection enables you to fix the issues before they actually become issues.

Common Scenarios

The following sections describe common IECE scenarios.

Identifying Web Site and Web Application Issues

IECE enables you to identify Web sites and Web applications that have compatibility issues with Internet Explorer®. After you deploy and start IECE running on your client computers, your users can visit any Web sites or Web applications, including line-of-business (LOB) Web sites and Web applications, to determine whether any compatibility issues exist. IECE and Internet Explorer® 7 add your compatibility issues to a log file, processed by the ACT-DC and uploaded to the ACT Log Processing Service. After the ACT Log Processing Service finishes processing the file, you can view the data and any known solutions as a report in the Application Compatibility Manager.

Excluding Known Compatibility Issues

IECE enables you to locate Web-related compatibility issues and mark them as Unimportant, which further enables you to filter those issues from your reports in the Application Compatibility Manager. This capability is particularly helpful if you cannot fix the issues but find the Web sites or applications critical to your organization.

At this time, the only way to fix many of the Internet Explorer issues is to make changes to the problematic Web site. The Application Compatibility Manager can mitigate only a few Internet Explorer issues. For example, the Application Compatibility Manager can mitigate the pop-up blocking issues by adding the affected Web site to the Pop-Up Blocker Allow List, but it cannot do anything to address object caching or Low Rights Internet Explorer (LoRIE) issues.

Technologies Related to IECE

The following sections describe the technologies that are related to IECE.

Application Compatibility Manager

The Application Compatibility Manager works with IECE so you can view your compatibility data in report form. The Analyze screen of the Application Compatibility Manager enables you to select a Web site so you can view reports of the Web site details, issue details, risk details, and possible solutions.

IECE Dependencies

The following sections describe the IECE dependencies.

Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit Data Collector

IECE requires the ACT-DC to start and stop its processes, to process the internal log file and generate the IECE log file, and to upload the IECE log file to the ACT Log Processing Service.

ACT Log Processing Service

IECE requires the ACT Log Processing Service to process internal logs and to generate logs for the Application Compatibility Manager reports.

Internet Explorer 7

Internet Explorer® 7 works with IECE to enable the logging of Web-related compatibility issues to the Microsoft Windows NT® event log.

See Also

Concepts

Internet Explorer Compatibility Evaluator (IECE) Technical Reference
Phase 1: Collecting Your Compatibility Data
Phase 2: Analyzing Your Compatibility Data
Known Internet Explorer Security Feature Issues