REDMOND, WA — Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 browser will roll out automatically on February 12th, and network administrators who want to keep the older-and-still-functional IE6 on the machines under their care need to take steps now to prevent the latest innovations from Redmond from infiltrating their infrastructures.Although it’s unclear how upgrading to IE7 might negatively affect the 35-percent of Web surfers who continue to rely on IE6 (according to December 2007 statistics from Web metrics vendor Net Applications), Microsoft has posted instructions for preventing the automatic update just in case.

Essentially, network admins who have configured their installations of Windows Server Update Services to automatically approve Update Rollup packages pushed by Microsoft must change that setting before February 12th. (The default installation for WSUS is not to auto-approve Update Rollup packages.) After synchronizing the update package with the WSUS server, they can switch the auto-approval rule back on. (If you don’t know what any of this means, you probably don’t need to worry about it.)

It’s unclear what effect the IE7 Update Rollup may have on systems equipped with the Blocker Toolkit designed to prevent the automatic installation of the new browser without sysadmins’ knowledge. Microsoft released the toolkit prior to the new browser’s launch and did not mention it in its recent warning about the Update Rollup.

IE7 was released in the fall of 2006 and immediately made available for manual downloading and via the consumer-directed, automatic Windows Update service. According to the Microsoft Update website, IE7 was “designed to make everyday tasks easier, provide dynamic security protection and improve the development platform and manageability. End-user improvements include a streamlined interface, tabbed browsing, printing advances, improved search functionality, instant feeds (RSS), dynamic security protection, and more.” In addition, to increase end-user Web security, IE7 was the first product Microsoft released that may be downloaded and installed even on machines that are not running certified-as-genuine copies of Windows XP.