East Melbourne 12/9/2015 5:48:48 AM
News / Education

Learning Seat Updates Devices, Operating Systems and Browsers

Organisations far and wide have successfully been moving away from Internet Explorer 8.  From our internal tracking last month, we’re at just over 7% of our user base still using Internet Explorer 8.  Given the challenges upgrading software across entire organisations, this is a huge improvement considering we started 2015 with over 15%.

However, the upgrade journey continues with Microsoft’s latest announcement[1]. As of January 2016, Microsoft will only support Internet Explorer 11. Internet Explorer 8, 9, 10 will not be supported.  We’ve run some preliminary numbers and the results indicate that over a quarter of our user base is using Internet Explorer 10 or below.  Considering that Microsoft is ending support for these browsers in a little over 3 months means that we’ll have to focus on getting the message out and organisations will have to step up their upgrades.

Technology is changing rapidly and here at Learning Seat we are continually balancing the amount of effort and cost around testing and supporting the multitude of devices and browsers that exist. What we’ve learned with the most recent exercise with Internet Explorer 8 is that we cannot continually support old technologies.  Old technologies hamper our ability to deliver innovative solutions for our clients as well as cost significantly more to ensure that our courses will work on older technology. The cost just isn’t financial, often this means disabling or removing functionality because older browsers don’t have the ability to run it.

Our strategy around portable device support will be changing as well. Given the magnitude of different devices on the market, we can’t realistically test and support each and every device that manufacturers release. Instead, we will offer support on the following portable devices for each manufacturer and operating system. For Apple, we offer support on the iPad 2 and above. For Android, we offer support for the Samsung Galaxy Tab S2. For Microsoft, we offer support for the Surface Pro 2 and above.

One of the biggest challenges around our strategy is what to do with our existing library courses. Our library has over 300 courses, all developed with various authoring tools and platforms. To align an existing library course to our new strategy, we need to completely rebuild the course in our new framework. We have streamlined our course development process so that newly developed library courses will support our updated requirements. Over time, we will expand our library courses to support these requirements as well, but in the interim, please ask your Business Manager or Account Manager if you have compatibility questions about specific courses.

We’re proud to announce that our new compliance suite, Law at Work, has been developed to support the updated requirements.

Finally, if you don’t have one of the devices or browsers below, it is highly likely that your device and browser will work with our content and learning management system. It is just that we are unable to guarantee or support issues arising from using different devices due to the difficulties in procuring different hardware as well as the time involved in identifying device specific issues.

Below are the detailed device, operating system and browser support details.

As of 1 January 2016, LearnConnect and the Law at Work compliance suite will support the following:

Desktop and Laptop Operating Systems and Browsers

Windows 7, 8.1, 10
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 with Compatibility View Disabled and Document Mode set to 11
• Microsoft Edge (latest)
• Mozilla Firefox (latest)
• Google Chrome (latest)

Mac OS X 10.10, 10.11

• Apple Safari (latest)
• Mozilla Firefox (latest)
• Google Chrome (latest)

Please note we do not support virtualised environments such as Citrix.

Portable Devices, Operating Systems and Browsers

iPad 2 or above
• iOS 9
• Apple Safari (latest)

Samsung Galaxy Tab S2
• Android 5.0, 5.1
• Google Chrome (latest)

Microsoft Surface Pro 2 or above
• Windows 10
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 with Compatibility View Disabled
• Microsoft Edge (latest)
• Mozilla Firefox (latest)
• Google Chrome (latest)

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/mt163707.aspx

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