At this week's Tech Ed IT Pro 2008 in Orlando, IE Team announced some of the enhancements that they're making in Internet Explorer 8 to help IT Professionals deploy and manage IE8 within their organization.

Here is a quick run down to all the support that IE 8 is going to offer for IT Professionals:

Slipstream Support in Internet Explorer 8

Deploying Internet Explorer 7 as part of Windows XP installation was v.hard and troublesome. Many IT Pros wanted to update their Windows XP images to contain IE7 by default, so IE7 gets installed as part of the OS install. To do that the IT Pros needed to boot their existing images of Windows XP, install IE7 and then recapture the image. This process roughly used to took about 2 hours per image.

With Internet Explorer 8 and Windows Vista this isn't the case anymore! as they will allow us to “Slipstream” Internet Explorer 8 into a Vista image so that when you deploy Vista it already contains Internet Explorer 8.  Slipstream IE8  will only take about 10-15 minute per image.

Application Compatibility and Internet Explorer 8

Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) will help IT Pros detect and resolve potential issues between IE8 and internal applications and web sites. Further more Group Policy settings will help control those settings that most impact compatibility.

Updates to Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK)

The Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) will enable IT Pros to customize IE for their company’s needs. IEAK was previously available with IE 6 & IE 7. But in IE8, IEAK is getting a facelift and some enhancements has been added to improve the performance of IEAK. IEAK8 will support custom IE8 builds for new platforms: Vista and Windows Server 2008 and new IE8 features like Activities and Web Slices.

All of the above mentioned features will be included when IE 8 Beta 2 is released sometime in August.

Taimur Asad (Via Startup Meme)