Running BAM Portal in Internet Explorer 11: Enable Compatibility view

Sometimes websites don’t look like you expect them to. Images might not appear, menus might be out of place, and text could be jumbled together. This might be caused by a compatibility problem between Internet Explorer and the site you’re on and most of the times this behavior can be fixed by adding the site to your Compatibility View list.

Compatibility View was introduced in Windows Internet Explorer 8 to help existing content continue to work with Windows Internet Explorer 7, while developers updated their content to support modern interoperable web standards. Well, unfortunately for us, BAM Portal never was updated and continues to have problems of compatibility.

As always one of the downsides of dealing with new versions of products like IE and so on… is figuring out where some features/options have moved in this new release. And this exactly one of these cases…

“Starting with IE11, document modes are considered deprecated and should no longer be used. Webpages that require legacy document modes to display properly should be rewritten to use features defined by modern standards.”  – Source: Specifying legacy document modes

For this reason, in Internet Explorer 11, the compatibility view button is removed from the address bar. Microsoft felt that the button had outlived his purpose because it’s been many years now since Microsoft introduced X-UA-Compatible tags. Web developers were supposed to add these X-UA-Compatible meta tags to their website’s HTML header to indicate web page compatibility and not leave it to the user to depend on the button to correctly render the page.

However, and fortunately for us BizTalkers, the compatibility view feature still remains in the browser.

You can turn it on or off by:

• Click on the Settings icon in the top right corner of IE11 and select the “Compatibility View Settings” item in the drop-down menu

• In the “Compatibility View Settings” box, add the problematic website URL – aka BAM Portal – and then click Add.
  • Compatibility View is turned on for this single website, for this specific computer.
• Enable both checkbox “Display intranet sites in Compatibility View” and “Use Microsoft compatibility lists”, and then click Close.

Once you turn on Compatibility View, Internet Explorer will automatically show the BAM Portal in Compatibility View each time you visit fixing all the previous behaviors problems.

Author: Sandro Pereira

Sandro Pereira lives in Portugal and works as a consultant at DevScope. In the past years, he has been working on implementing Integration scenarios both on-premises and cloud for various clients, each with different scenarios from a technical point of view, size, and criticality, using Microsoft Azure, Microsoft BizTalk Server and different technologies like AS2, EDI, RosettaNet, SAP, TIBCO etc. He is a regular blogger, international speaker, and technical reviewer of several BizTalk books all focused on Integration. He is also the author of the book “BizTalk Mapping Patterns & Best Practices”. He has been awarded MVP since 2011 for his contributions to the integration community. View all posts by Sandro Pereira