Meet the Enterprise Site Discovery Toolkit for Internet Explorer 11. Just a quick heads up, if it sounds invasive, it is because you are used to a private network and computer. This is meant for business, where the IT department regulates virtually everything from operating systems and the programs running on it, to the network the machine connects to. So, knowing the sites you are visiting is actually the IT department having test data for any bugs the browser is experiencing while you work on web applications.
The Enterprise Site Discovery Toolkit promises to make it easier to discover the most used business applications, so resources can be better spent on prioritized applications, not simply the whole list. Along with the Enterprise Mode IE, it will make Enterprise upgrades easier.
When data collection is enabled (default is off), it will collect data from every single website visited via Internet Explorer 11. The following data will be collected, and associated with the browsed URL: the URL of the browsed site with embedded parameters (e.g. /v?=3), the top level domain of the site (e.g. com, org, net), the GUID of the ActiveX controls the site loads, number of times the URL has been visited, which Doc mode was used by Internet Explorer, why that Doc mode was set, reason Browser is in current state, number of visits to URL when browser hung, number of visits to the URL when the browser crashed, description of most recent navigation failure (e.g. 404 error), the zone used to browse sites (based on settings).
All of this data is collected locally in a WMI class while the user uses Internet Explorer. Once the data is present, it can be queried by the System Center Configuration Manager, or other similar tools, and is then combined with data from the rest of the users to represent the web browsing usage.
Using this data, IT departments would know more about the most visited sites, which sites are crashing, and have data to ensure they are compatible with the browser.
The user does not feel any slowdown due to the data collection, and the data is not collected when the browser is in a InPrivate session. However, the user is also not prompted about the data collection, so it is the responsibility of the IT department to check off their moral and legal obligations. If you’d like to set up this toolkit, you can get the full details here, and a guide here.
Further reading: Internet Explorer 11, Microsoft
