Fortres on Win2K Professional

[Karen G. Schneider]

Is anyone securing a significant number of public Win2K Internet & Office
workstations with Fortres or a similar product?  Are you happy?

Background: we secure our public NT4 web-only machines with a combination of
NT system policy and NTFS permission batch files, and that works fine.  It's
a simple scenario (well... it seems simple now that I know it...) and the
machines run great.  We also use policy for a few configuration and security
issues on staff workstations, with equal success (though we aren't running
NTFS batch files on these machines).

But we have 26 Windows 2000 professional workstations headed our way this
January, at least 12 of which will be using major components of Office 2000
(Excel, Word, Access, Publisher, Powerpoint) in addition to Internet
Explorer.  The public will continue to have walk-in access to these
machines.

>From what I've seen of it, we have a win2k domain, the group policy editor
will be great for staff machines and probably still for the web-only
machines.   But as we evaluate Windows 2000 Professional, group policy, 2000
security, and more, and lay out what we need to get done and when, we are
starting to reevaluate the feasibility of the "roll your own" approach for
security on the public Office/Internet workstations (particularly since
we're just a couple of folks, swamped as it is).

The cost issue is trivial--if anything, in terms of human labor, the
home-grown approach is probably more expensive by a long shot.  It would
cost us less than $600 for Fortres for our 26 public workstations, half that
if I bought 15 licenses just for the machines that have Office.  The
"turn-off" has been our previous experience with Fortres and Windows
95--it's how we are currently configured on the old "do everything" machines
in our lab, and we've had freezes and other issues that we never see on the
NT machines, old or new.  (Of course, this raises an unanswerable question,
was it Fortres--the OS--or other things?)

Thoughts?

Karen G. Schneider kgs at bluehighways.com
Assistant Director of Technology
Shenendehowa Public Library, Clifton Park, NY
http://www.shenpublib.org