ActiveX and Thin-Client Installs

[dbm63]

We have an integrator who has deployed a thin-client
solution. One of the main selling points of going to
a web-based client was that, when the time came for an
upgrade of the client, the users could do the upgrade
through their web browser and IT would not need to visit
the desktop to install the software.

Now the time has come for an upgrade and they are telling
us that you need Administrator or Power-User rights to
install the new client. Unfortunately, most of our users
have no such rights in Active Directory. Their claim is
that the installation requires Administrator rights to
register ActiveX components on the system.

I'm not a Windows programmer but this seems to make no
sense in the context of a thin-client. Could someone
enlighten me as to whether there is no way to install the
ActiveX controls as the current user or some other
workaround?

Thanks for any help you can give me!

Dan.

 

[BobRodes]

The point about Thin clients is that they don't use ActiveX controls. That would be my understanding of the term. I suspect that the integrator lacked experience in deploying ActiveX controls over a web based system. I've attempted the same solution, and wound up abandoning it eventually, putting my ActiveX controls into a Form and distributing the system as an exe install.

Unfortunately, one of the big problems with installing ActiveX controls over the web has been security. Obviously, writing values into the registry of the target system led to all sorts of abuse (you probably have experienced some of these "browser hijackers" who make themselves the home page of the browser and then start spamming the machine with popup ads, as one example). Most sysadmins have responded by not allowing web-based downloads to access the registry, and rightly so. Microsoft's "certificate" initiative to create some sort of security on this really never took off, in part because Microsoft attempted to control the system and profit from it.

Now, it might be possible to have your sysadmin allow ordinary users to automatically download and install exe's only from a particular site, the one that the integrator specifies as the source site for upgrades. The talking points are that your current system security doesn't allow the installation of ActiveX controls, and either it has to allow them in as narrow a way as possible, or your integrator has to remove them from the product. The latter seems unlikely, since a "thin client" really doesn't have the richness that ActiveX controls can provide, so you'll almost certainly have to significantly abbreviate your feature set.

HTH

Bob