ThinKiosk 2.0 Beta Preview

andyjmorgan — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 22:16:47 +0000

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for me, my mailbox has been flooded, the feedback and functionality idea’s for ThinKiosk’s next release have been flying in. While most of my Irish bretherin were out celebrating the ousting of snakes from our fair Isle this week, I stayed behind and broke the back of the next release.

Version 2.0 is a complete rework of the code as I adopted some standards, a big thank you again to Pierre Marmignon for taking the time to point me in the right direction!

With that out of the way, I’m delighted to announce the functionality to be included in version 2.0!

ThinKiosk 2.0 Layout:

Without further ado, lets get to the goodies:

Customisable title:

The title for ThinKiosk can now to updated to include your corporate slogan, company name or consulting company, whatever you like.

A simple registry key entry will allow you to change this title to deliver a once off, professional solution to your customer or users.

Random: Current CCIA’s will probably shudder at that title, I still do.

Site Selection:

If you wish to present a list of websites to which the user can login to, ThinKiosk will now cater for this with a simple selection box at the bottom of the screen. You can optionally populate this list (or not, its up to you) with up to five websites.

The label’s and url’s are configurable via registry or group policy putting you in full control of the appearance.

Home Button:

A quick and easy home button has been added to allow access gateway users to log in after timeout without having to reload their browser. Simple but effective.

Custom Tools:

A frequent request I received was to allow the users access to certain commands from the Kiosk, these requests ranged from TeamViewer, to Remote Desktop, to printers, to EWF access to Installing windows updates and I was beginning to worry things might get out of control if I attempted to integrate them all… So I didn’t!

With the custom tools menu, you can populate up to five commands you wish to allow your users access to. The command line and label’s for each command are fully customisable so you can do what you wish with them.

Local Printer Management:

So one of the coolest, yet understated features in the Citrix receiver is the printing channel right? Single driver for all, compressed and quick printing popping out on your local machine? Awesome Right?

Yeah, feedback dictated that thought too so I set about integrating the local windows printing control panel items into ThinKiosk. But, alas I hit a fairly big stumbling block, calling the printers display window was also calling explorer.exe… which pretty much circumvents all of ThinKiosk’s advantages.

Undeterred, I decided to write my own Printer control menu!

From this menu, you can:

Add a printer (this can be restricted)
Open a printers queue to dispatch stuck jobs
Open and configure printers properties
set your default printer

It’s still an unpolished diamond visually, but it works well. I’ll pretty it up once the testing has been completed.

Power Management:

With ThinKiosk 2.0 I really wanted to add more benefits and this feature is one I’m really proud of. ThinKiosk now has power saving options as follows to power off your Kiosk Pc’s when they are not in use, saving you money!

Power Down at a certain time:

If you would like to power your machines off at night, but not disturb active users. I have you covered!

You can instruct ThinKiosk to power down at a certain time each evening and when that time is reached the user is notified:

This shutdown can be suppressed by the user within five minutes of it triggering, and once suppressed the user will not be notified again for that day.

Power down when not in use:

If you would like to power down your pc’s after a period of inactivity, I’ve also got you covered!

You can configure an idle time via registry or policy and if the pc / kiosk is idle for longer than this It will warn the user of the inpending shutdown. This can also be cancelled and suppressed as above.

Offline Configuration tool:

When configuring ThinKiosk outside of a domain or setting up ThinKiosk for a test, it was a bit cumbersome to configure the registry keys each time. For this reason I’ve put together an offline configuration tool to speed up the process in an offline situation or in a quick proof of concept:

One last thing?

ThinKiosk will, always, remain free to use!

I will also be introducing a support & maintenance option for companies who would like SLA based support, customisations and notified software updates. But this will never affect the happy free users.

How can i get a copy of the beta?

I’ll be releasing the beta later this week so follow me on twitter (@andyjmorgan) for updates. If you would prefer me to send you a copy when its ready, Drop me an email on Andrew (at) andrewmorgan.ie.

Andrew Morgan » Citrix HDX