Appendix D

Creating a Customized Deep Freeze Enterprise Console

The Deep Freeze Enterprise Console includes the ability to create a new Enterprise Console with limited capabilities. A customized, limited console can be distributed in your organization to allow certain users to perform desired tasks, while ensuring they do not have access to the full capabilities of the Enterprise Console.

In this example, we will create a limited Console suitable for distribution to a teacher or computer lab instructor. In this scenario, we want the teacher to be able to restart machines, lock the keyboard and mouse on demand, and send messages to the students. However, we do not want the teacher to be able to boot the machines into a Thawed state, uninstall Deep Freeze, or perform other IT-exclusive tasks.

The Console Customizer can be launched from Tools > Console Customizer.

We will leave Console functions > Activation selected. This will ensure that if the new Console is moved to a different computer, a One Time Password will need to be entered on the computer the new Console is moved to. If this security precaution is not a concern in your environment, do not select this option.

Console functions > One Time Password is not selected because we do not want a teacher to be able to reboot the computer in Thawed mode under any circumstances. If a teacher reboots the computer in Thawed mode, students might install unnecessary software on the computer which will be retained even after a reboot.

We will leave all options under Workstation commands selected because we want a teacher to be able to send messages to students, and to shutdown, restart, and wake computers as required.

We will only leave three options under Deep Freeze commands selected: Unlock, Lock, and Reboot in Frozen state. This will allow a teacher to lock (and unlock) the keyboard and mouse on student computers as required, as well as to reboot computers Frozen (just in case a computer is ever accidentally left Thawed by IT staff). Leaving all other options cleared will ensure a teacher is unable to permanently modify a computer.

Finally, we will clear all Workstation install/uninstall commands and all Scheduler commands because we don’t want our teacher to use any of these options.

Once all options have been selected, click Save As to save a new Enterprise Console. A standard Save As dialog is displayed:

Save the new limited Enterprise Console and distribute it to the required users.