Alemba to end support for IE as of Alemba Service Manager v10.4

With the release of Alemba Service Manager in 2018, we expanded the capability of the tool to break the constraints of plug-ins and the reliance on Internet Explorer. The available interfaces of Core, Nano and Portal were available to use in modern browsers such as Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. New features, enhanced security measures and improved performance techniques necessitated the removal of Internet Explorer support for Core and Nano as they were incompatible.

Until now, the self-service portal has continued to be available using Internet Explorer. However, similar reasons, including Microsoft’s recent release of IE mode in Edge for legacy apps and their App Assure programme, has driven us to focus on modern browsers as it makes the transition to Edge available to the corporate environment. Therefore, the self-service portal will also not be supported using Internet Explorer or Microsoft Edge Legacy from version 10.4 onwards.

Alemba continually reviews the market leading tools available to provide the fastest, most secure and compatible experience possible.

What does this mean for vFire Service Manager v9.x?

vFire Core has a dependency upon Internet Explorer 11 due to the ActiveX Control Wrapper used to produce the multiple window interface within a browser session. IE 11 is the last Microsoft browser to support ActiveX controls (as an Add On). Modern browsers (including Microsoft Edge Chromium) no longer support ActiveX controls, and therefore vFire Core will not run on these browsers.

With this being the case, the following points should be noted:

• Due to the reduced support for Internet Explorer 11 and cyber-security concerns, most organisations are removing their reliance on Internet Explorer 11 and Microsoft Edge Legacy, especially as they move to one of the modern browsers (i.e. Chrome, Microsoft Edge Chromium, etc) for their Standard Operating Environment (SOE).
• While your current version of vFire Service Manager is still being supported by Alemba for the foreseeable future, any issues that necessitate code fixes will require an upgrade.

Microsoft Edge IE mode

We are aware that more recent versions of Edge have a degree of ActiveX support in their IE mode. This has not been tested or certified by Alemba. Anecdotally, we have heard that vFire 9.x runs fine on Edge in IE mode. However, our strong recommendation is still to upgrade to ASM v10.

Where do we go from here?

Alemba has been aware of the deprecation of Internet Explorer for some time. This has led to a considerable amount of development effort made to replace all the ActiveX controls with pure HTML5 mark-up language. This means that upgrading to Alemba Service Manager v10 (the HTML5 replacement for vFire Service Manager v9) provides the following advantages:

• Supported on all chromium-based browsers (Google Chrome & Microsoft Edge Chromium) as well as other modern browsers (Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc).
• Seamless upgrade of your existing vFire configuration (screens, workflows, Call/Request/CMDB data, etc) to Alemba Service Manager.
• Refreshed interface that incorporates all the “quality of life” features of using a fully HTML5 interface.
• Responsive design allows for the self-service portal to be run on mobile devices (phones, tablets, etc) in a dynamic and intuitive fashion.
• Enhanced functionality around self-service portal design, allowing you to further tailor the self-service experience to your end users.
• Leveraging the power of Syncfusion dashboards, you can now present your Business Intelligence dashboards within Alemba Service Manager, providing modern reporting upon your organisation’s data.

Alemba Service Manager is available now!

The Alemba team are happy to work with you to upgrade your vFire Service Manager instance to a modern ITSM experience. Feel free to reach out to your account manager to discuss what is involved in upgrading your vFire Service Manager system to Alemba Service Manager.

For more information about this change, please contact your account manager.