EBS maintains these two pages:
http://ebs.msu.edu/Technical/OSBrowsersAdobeRAM.htm
http://ebs.msu.edu/Technical/SoftwareDownloads.htm
I have had good luck here with IE9 and Firefox ESR 17 (extended support release), both with Java 7. Where there can be issues is with DocumentViewer (http://docview.ais.msu.edu/). Java 7 update 11 broke a large amount of functionality in DocumentViewer (which is linked to from within EBS, if I remember correctly). We took steps to roll back the few people that needed to print documents from that system to Java 6. The recommendation at the time was Java 6 update 23, but I haven't had any issues running Java 6 update 39 during the testing we were doing a while back. These systems have since been upgraded to Java 6 update 43 and I haven't gotten any calls about DocumentViewer breaking. I can't speak officially about the DocumentViewer folks, but I've heard that an upgrade is in the works that may remove the Java 6 requirement. That would be a nice change, even if it means the requirement becomes Java 7.
More and more, I've been seeing issues where IE8 and Firefox 19 don't work flawlessly on EBS. These few cases have been fixed by either IE9 or Firefox ESR 17. As far as Adobe Reader X goes, EBS's recommendations are to disable protected mode. I haven't needed to do that, but I'm guessing it has to do with secportal.ebsp.msu.edu being listed in the Trusted Sites Zone, which should disable protected mode for just that URL. SAP GUI 7.30 has been working rather smoothly, too. There was one issue that had me stumped, but apparently that was some kind of back-end issue that ended up being resolved.
There's one other EBS recommendation that I took it upon myself to do a little differently. IE's compatibility mode is apparently still necessary. If you enable compatibility mode using the broken page button in IE, that will enable compatibility mode for *.msu.edu. Instead, I added secportal.ebsp.msu.edu to Group Policy, so that I wouldn't have to deal with other MSU web sites getting applied to compatibility mode unnecessarily. I also added it to the popup blocker exception list as well.
Perhaps I should summarize the changes I made:
secportal.ebsp.msu.edu: compatibility mode, trusted sites, popup blocker exception
docview.ais.msu.edu: trusted sites
ntweb1.ais.msu.edu: trusted sites
*.ais.msu.edu: popup blocker exception
This works in almost all cases for IE9 users. The one problem I have had to deal with on occasion (probably because I haven't taken the time to make a GPO out of it) is when a workstation doesn't have the default settings for the trusted sites zone. Resetting the trusted sites zone to "Medium (default)" fixes the problem.
As far as UAC goes, it's still turned on. I don't think there has ever been a cause for me to disable it outright.
We did have an issue a while back about SAP GUI launching, but doing nothing. It turns out that setting "Do not save encrypted pages to disk" either by policy or locally will break SAP GUI's connection to the browser.
From: Kramer, Jack [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, March 19, 2013 11:29 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MSUNAG] EBS Woes
Did you remember to sacrifice a goat to Hannah under the full moon?
Seriously though, we've found conflicts depending on the Java version installed. 7u17 works fine on one of our machines, but another user got a recommendation to run 6u23 from EBS. Also, do you have UAC on?
----
Jack Kramer
Manager of Information Technology
Communications and Brand Strategy
Michigan State University
w: 517-884-1231 / c: 248-635-4955
On Mar 19, 2013, at 11:05 AM, Bill Park <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
Is there a website somewhere that shows exactly what versions of IE, Adobe, and any other software that is officially compatible with EBS and what settings need to be enabled/disabled in order for it to work? I recently just installed 4 new Dell Optiplex 9010s running Windows 7 Pro x64 with IE9 and Adobe Reader 10 (with the latest updates for version 10) as I was told that's what users need to have installed. I was also told the following settings need to be set in order for things to work:
IE9 (because evidently 10 is not supported)
-Popup blocker must be disabled
-Adobe Reader must be the default handler for PDFs
-Compatibility view should be enabled
-Zoom must be at 100%
Adobe Reader 10 (because evidently 11 is not supported)
-Disable "Enable protected mode at startup"
-"Display PDF in browser" should be enabled
Am I missing something here? I have set those settings on all of the computers and there are problems with EBS in some way on all of the computers. One of the computers I cannot "generate a pdf form" for a travel reimbursement coversheet. One of the other computers trying to bring up the cost redistribution form does nothing. SAPGUI launches and then nothing happens in the browser. There are more problems but those are some examples.
Does anyone have any advice as to exactly how I need to setup Adobe Reader and IE in order to get these things to work properly? Again, these are all brand new installs of Windows 7 Pro x64 and they're using IE9 (x86) and Adobe Reader 10.
Thanks,
Bill
