IE9 Really Does Work with the Microsoft Partner Portal
I was gearing up to jump down Microsoft's throat late last week after I saw Twitter traffic from Microsoft partners reporting that they were getting error messages when trying to use the new Internet Explorer 9 beta on the Microsoft Partner Portal. To quote Wayne Beekman's tweet early Thursday, "Installed #IE9 and @microsoft Partner Member Center Page will not load …"
Partners are urged constantly by Microsoft to test Microsoft's beta software aggressively so they can represent said software equally aggressively to customers.
Well, it turns out that Microsoft didn't mean for the Partner Portal to reject IE9. An RCP test on Friday with IE9 on the portal worked fine. Eric Ligman, Microsoft's Global Partner Experience Lead, sent out a series of Tweets Friday afternoon to Beekman and other partners Friday afternoon reporting that the issue had been fixed.
Later Friday evening, a Microsoft spokesperson e-mailed a reply to a question about the issue that I had posed that morning. According to the e-mail, "The MS Partner Portal issue you flagged this morning was not related to IE9 compatibility, but instead, was caused by a minor configuration file issue that was quickly fixed by our Web team. At this point, the issue has been resolved and partners should be able to access the MS Partner Portal as normal."
Am I thrilled that the Partner Portal wasn't completely ready for duty when the IE9 beta hit testers last week? No. But this kind of thing is what beta periods are for, at least for companies not named Google. I'm very glad to see that the Microsoft Partner Portal, an important resource, is fully part of the Microsoft roadmap for new technologies.
Posted by Scott Bekker on September 23, 2010