Exceed onDemand A Technical Whitepaper

Exceed onDemand 5 — A Technical Whitepaper
Figure 40 — Last step, select the installation settings, including path types. Click Build to finish
User Rights and Security
Exceed onDemand Deployment Wizard does not require the user to have any particular access
rights on the machine.
On Windows NT, ® both Users and Administrators can install and use ActiveX controls through their
browser. On Windows 2000 and XP, Microsoft has introduced an additional user group in between
users and administrators: the power user group. Administrators and Power Users are capable of
using and installing ActiveX controls with their standard rights. As far as users are concerned, Exceed
onDemand Deployment Wizard includes a mechanism to allow these users with low privileges to
perform the deployment without having to change their rights. This mechanism is automatic and fully
respects the Microsoft Windows security mode.
A common sentiment among administrators is that ActiveX equates to a security breach on their
users’ machines. Nothing could be further from the truth. Actually, a signed ActiveX applet has
no more potential for destruction than a signed Java applet that has been granted the rights to read
and write on the disk (which is the case with most java web-to-host applets that are available).
More importantly, ActiveX is not particularly related to the browser. ActiveX is simply a part of the
COM architecture specification, which allows developers to describe visual interfaces to their COM
objects. Actually, Windows users use thousands of ActiveX objects every day without knowing it
and without using a browser.
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