EMC Documentum eRoom (‘eRoom’) is a web-based collaborative workspace for distributed teams. However, it doesn’t seem to get the support needed for the seemingly endless stream of new internet explorers. Problems where introduced with Micorsoft Internet Explorer 8 and continue to plague eRoom with Microsoft Internet Explorer 9. Mozilla Firefox has changed their upgrade path from minimal version increases, as with version 3.0 to version 3.0.17 that reigned from June 17, 2008 to January 5, 2010, to version 4 through version 7 from March 22, 2011 to September 27, 2011.

Somewhere within the overly complicated code for eRoom are version checks for web browsers. If the version of the web explorer does not meet the condition, then an error screen will appear. Here is an example of that error with Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 and eRoom (version 7.4.2).

When this question was raised in a Microsoft newsgroup, the response was:

Contact eRoom… “It told me to upgrade to IE 5 or 6???” – they are not IE8 ready yet and have not changed their site to recognize IE8.

One can draw their own conclusion to this response. In 2009, the original thought to avoid this problem was not to upgrade Internet Explorer to version 8. This can no longer be the solution.

WORK-A-ROUND Solution
I have figured out a work-a-round inspired by the work on Fiddlertool.com. A registry hack that will change the User Agent value of Internet Explorer so that IE will pass the eRoom browser check. I have tested it with Internet Explorer 9 on a Microsoft Windows (64-bit) operating system, successfully. Not only will the eRoom login page be avaible the eRoom plugin works too enabling such features as drag and drop and seamless file maniplulation.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings.0\User Agent]
"Version"="MSIE 7.0"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings.0\User Agent]
"Version"="MSIE 7.0"

You can verifiy what your browser user agent string is here.

To return the Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 values back to the original state.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings.0\User Agent]
"Version"=-

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings.0\User Agent]
"Version"=-

You can verifiy what your browser user agent string is here.

Updates

Update: October 14, 2011. Updated for Internet Explorer 9 and eRoom (version 7.4.3).

Update: May 7, 2009. I call to EMC informed me that the updates will be in their next release. The release date is expected sometime in the next few months. There is no supported work-a-round. There are a couple of work-a-rounds which edits a file either to bypass browser checking or appends another file of the browser. This will allow access to eRoom, however, under certain conditions which may be too cumbersome for some. The most common annoyance of this work-a-round is that the page loads repeatedly until you manually stop the page load, the effect is a flickering effect. I am not going to publish either work-a-round as it still presents other annoyances.