Deploy Internet Explorer 11 using SCCM 2012 R2 - Internet Explorer is installed when you install the windows operating system and is the default browser for any windows OS. Today most of the companies use Windows 7 as the OS and IE 10 as the browser, with the release of Internet Explorer 11, the companies might be looking to upgrade their browser version from IE10 to IE11. The internet Explorer 11 offers better features than IE10 and is more faster and smoother when compared to IE10. Note that the Internet Explorer 11 is available for a number of systems and languages. Internet Explorer 11 is pre-installed on Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2. There are multiple ways on deploying internet explorer 11 and they are listed below.

System Center R2 2012 Configuration Manager – Deploy and install Internet Explorer 11 on your user’s computers through a software distribution package.

Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) – Download a single copy of the Internet Explorer 11 updates, caching them to local servers so your users’ computers can receive the updates directly from the WSUS servers, instead of through Windows Update.

Group Policy Software Installation – Deploy and install Internet Explorer 11 on your user’s computers through a combination of Group Policy and Active Directory.

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) – Add the Internet Explorer 11 update to your deployment share, using MDT to update your previously-deployed Windows image.

In this post we will see the steps to deploy the IE11 using SCCM 2012 R2 on a Windows 7 computer. We will download the Internet Explorer Administration Kit 11 first. Internet Explorer Administration Kit 11 (IEAK 11) simplifies the creation, deployment, and management of customized Internet Explorer 11 packages. It can be used to configure the out-of-box Internet Explorer 11 experience, and to manage user settings after deployment.

When you install Internet Explorer 11 for Windows 7, the installer program tries to automatically install some prerequisite components. If this part of the installation fails, Internet Explorer stops the installation process.We will download the prerequisites first and then install IEAK 11.

The prerequisites are available for both 32 bit and 64 bit OS, download the appropriate files depending on whether you are running a 32-bit or 64-bit edition of the operating system. Download the files and extract each update to a folder using 7zip.

The below screenshot shows the updates extracted to each folder.

Install the Internet Explorer Administration Kit 11 on SCCM server or any computer you want. The below listed screenshots shows the installation of IEAK 11, you can skip these if you are familiar with the installation. Click Next.

Choose Internal Distribution via a Corporate Intranet. Click Next.

Complete the installation and click Finish.

Now the IEAK 11 customization wizard pops up, this wizard will help you to customize, deploy and manage IE. Click Next.

Choose the location where you want to store the package. Click Next.

Choose the Target Platform and click Next.

Choose the Target Language and click Next.

 Package Type Selection – Click Full Installation Package. Click Next.

You can choose all the features and customize them as per your requirement. Select the IE11 features that you wish to customize and click Next.

Click on Synchronize.

Now we know that IE11 requires certain prerequisites which we have download already. Let’s add them to custom components. Click on Add.

For every KB update go to the individual update folder and select the cabinet file.

Provide the name for that component (provide KB number as its easy to identify the update), choose Install before Internet Explorer (we want the updates to be installed before IE11 is installed) and click Add.

When you have added all the components, it should resemble the below screenshot. Click Next.

User Experience – Choose Completely Silent Installation and No restart. Click Next and complete the wizard.

When you open the destination folder you will see the IE11 package. One of them is an app and other one is windows installer package (.msi).

In the above step we have got the .msi file,  we will now create an application and choose the IE11 msi file and click Next.

Click Next. Deploy the app to the device collection.

Now on the client computer we see that the app is available. Click on Install.

Wait for some time while the installation is completed. Check the AppEnforce.log file on client computer for troubleshooting. We see that the IE11 is installed successfully. Though we had suppressed the reboot during the creation of package, I would recommend to reboot the client computer once.