I can't say what happened at your company, but at mine (which is a bit bigger), the IT people started "qualifying" IE7 when it came out. It took them until aft

I can't say what happened at your company, but at mine (which is a bit bigger), the IT people started "qualifying" IE7 when it came out. It took them until after IE8 was released to get all the various internal groups working and tested on IE7. The testing part was really the big piece, so they couldn't just jump to IE8 when it was released because it would have meant months or years redoing the testing cycle.