Public PC Security Software

[Jim Rosaschi]

We have used both Fortress and Ikiosk on both Win 95 and 3.1 computers,
and find Fortress to be a little bit more bother and less what we need.

One irritating thing with Fortress has to do with the patron's ability to 
move the task bar around which causes the desktop to move, overlay, and 
hide icons.  This doesn't hurt anything--it just confuses all the folks
who don't suspect such trickery in the first place.  

We have had better luck with Fortress on Win 3.1 than Win 95, and better 
luck with Ikiosk overall.  It is possible this Fortress taskbar thing is 
a setup item we missed.  If you know how to fix this, please let me know.

We are using Carl's Everybody's menu builder in conjuction with the
Ikiosk products, and are seeing very tight security and flexible setup
on public use computers.  Ikiosk allows a wide variety of editing in the
dropdown menus for a wide variety of applications.

With Ikiosk, we have not been to set up ability to allow downloading
to a floppy WITHOUT allowing access to other drives.  Any hints?

We do feel that we are still testing and evaluating, and both
vendors are constantly listing upgraded, revised, or new products.  It
is possible that you will need two products from the same vendor (like
Ikiosk) or two products from different vendors to do what you want.

We have not yet found any combination of public PC security products which 
require no babysitting whatsoever.  (Groans of disappointment.)

We have also been using Ameritech's Pac for Windows (95).   In addition to 
being a front end to our DYNIX catalog, it provides much of the same 
kinds of PC security things we all want.  It has an attractive desktop 
which manages multiple applications, and it has been very reliable.  

Jim Rosaschi
Sonoma County Library
Santa Rosa, CA 
jimros at sonoma.lib.ca.us