IE 9 Automatic Updates

As reported around the net today, Microsoft has announced that beginning in 2012, Internet Explorer 9 will be included as an important update in the automatic updates system. This is going to be a problem for me at work. A lot of our staff don't care for IE9 and will seek out computers with IE8 to do their work. The biggest problem for me is that there are an unknown number of web sites that just don't yet work well with IE9. Granted, that's the fault of the site creators, but it's still an issue for our IE9 users. Three sites that I know of in particular (the Kentucky unemployment site, our library's payroll service site and our library's book discussion site) have serious issues when using IE9. In fact, the Kentucky unemployment site simply won't work at all with IE9. This is a huge problem for our patrons, many of whom live in Kentucky but for various reasons use our computers to file their claims.

Fortunately, Microsoft is providing a tool to disable the automatic update to IE9. Unfortunately, that means I have to install it on every computer we have (currently around 100 public and staff computers). This is additional workload I don't need right now.