Custom Exchange web forms do not render properly with IE 7.0

  • Article

I've seen this issue posted in the newsgroups a couple of times now along with a case or two on this coming to my attention.  So based on this, it seems like a good topic to bring up here.

The problem that you run into here is that the custom Exchange web forms that you have registered on your Exchange 2003 server don't work properly when viewed with IE 7.0.  The same forms still work properly if viewed with IE 6.0 or when IE 7.0 is used with the "User Agent String Utility" to browse the custom web form.  In the cases that I've seen all are involving the web forms view control and issues with this being properly rendered client side in IE 7.0.

We actually dug into the source on this one and saw that this was caused because of the way that we are detecting the browser that is requesting the content.  So the way that fix this issue is very similar to what is outlined in the following article:

How to modify the Browscap.ini file to enable script-based detection of Windows Internet Explorer 7 from a Web page - https://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;929744 

The main differences that are required, in addition to what is outlined above, to make this work properly with your Exchange web forms are the following key settings:

As per the article, add the following updates to the browsecap.ini, after the IE 6.0 section that already exists. To make sure that Exchange uses these new settings, you need to make sure that the updates are added to the browsecap.ini that resides in the C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\bin directory and not the one in the IIS server directory.

<Modifications>
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; IE 7.0

[IE 7.0]
browser=IE
Version=7.0
majorver=#7
minorver=#0
frames=True
tables=True
cookies=True
backgroundsounds=True
vbscript=True
javaapplets=True
javascript=True
ActiveXControls=True
Win16=False
beta=False
AK=False
SK=False
AOL=False
Update=False
WebFormsBrowserFlags=SupportsRichEdit&NoViewRender

[Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.*; Windows NT*)]
parent=IE 7.0
platform=WinNT
beta=False

[Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.*)]
parent=IE 7.0
beta=False
</Modifications>

The key entry here being the "WebFormsBrowserFlags=SupportsRichEdit&NoViewRender"

So, save these changes to the correct browsecap.ini and then go back and browse to your web form custom application with IE 7.0 and you should see the custom forms rendered correctly.