Mirabyte Releases Free Windows Lockdown Tool For Digital Signage

October 2, 2014 by Dave Haynes

A German software company has released a new, free software tool designed to make configuring and protecting things like Windows-based digital signage players and kiosks a lot easier than normal.

Mirabyte’s FrontFace Lockdown Tool organizes all the various settings and configuration options in different versions of Windows to lock-down and protect a public-facing kiosk PC or to make a PC ready for unattended, continuous 24/7 use like for digital signage applications. “Unfortunately these settings are hidden all over the operating system,” says Mirabyte in its marketing material, “which makes it difficult to manage them from a single point of configuration.”

In a news release, the company elaborates:

Even though there is also a special embedded version of Windows available that offers more configuration and security options than the normal, end-user version of Windows, it is still a lot of work to configure, lock down and protect a PC for a specialized use case. Also, quite often, the embedded version of Windows is not available since it can only be purchased in combination with special hardware and only from selected vendors.

This covers features such as the automatic logon without password entry at boot time as well as starting a dedicated application instead of the normal Windows Explorer / Desktop shell. Yet many other important settings such as the deactivation of the Ctrl+Alt+Del shortcut and the Windows Task Manager, but also screen saver and power management settings as well as various security and protection options can be easily configured within the graphical user interface of the FrontFace Lockdown Tool.

Custom configuration profiles may also be exported and reused on different PCs so the efficient preparation of multiple, identical PCs in a row is no problem. The FrontFace Lockdown Tool does not require an installation routine and can be run directly from a USB thumb drive which makes it the perfect tool for system administrators.

Mirabyte makes its own perpetual license-based signage and kiosk software, so this tool is a nice little way to drive awareness of those products. But the announcement says it will work with other software CMS platforms that run on Windows. Many of the more mature Windows-centric platforms on the market likely have a lot of this stuff sorted in their own device management toolsets, but this could be quite useful for smaller, never companies, as well as integrators.

The software can be used with all existing Windows-based kiosk or digital signage applications. It also includes dedicated configuration profiles for the popular kiosk software “FrontFace for Touch Kiosks” and the digital signage software “FrontFace for Public Displays”, offered by mirabyte Software as well.

The FrontFace Lockdown Tool is free of charge and may also be used for setting up commercial kiosk terminals or digital signage player PCs. It supports Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8/8.1 in all available editions (32/64 bit, as well as “Embedded Standard”).