You do what at your job?

Published on 15 June 2011 • Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

I tweeted yesterday that my job can be a little weird because I had to sit in the kitchen at the BBD office and watch a TV for a while. This generated some confused discussion, so what was I doing?

Our team is experimenting with the idea of putting screens around the company to share content and information, and I had to sit in the kitchen to make sure it worked by watching the content loop for a bit 😊

This is also a great opportunity to share some learnings from this with you:

TightVNC is still the best VNC option

Remote Desktop from Microsoft is THE best way to remotely connect to another machine, but it has one downside: it locks other users out. For our screen, we can’t have the login shown—and I don’t even know where to log in manually—so we need to see the content on the machine. We dropped to an older technology: VNC.

There are a lot of options in the VNC space, but we ended up with TightVNC as it actually runs as a service on a Windows 7 machine, whereas other VNC clients run in user space.

Auto-login to Windows

The login screen is also an issue when the machine boots, and I don’t want to remotely log in every time—so we configured Windows to auto-login to a specific account. This is thanks to the folks at Channel9—in particular Sarah Perez & Bradley Ward:

1. Change the following registry key to 1: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\AutoAdminLogon
2. This enables the feature in Windows.
3. Then run the following command: control userpasswords2
4. In this UI, untick the option "Users must enter a username and password to use this computer" and click OK.
5. It will then prompt you for the username & password to use. Done! Note: This is a security risk and not recommended, but sometimes it’s needed.

Open & Play Slideshow

We are using Microsoft PowerPoint for the content and needed to auto-run a slideshow at login. So, we created a shortcut to run PowerPoint with the /S switch (see this for info on switches) and the filename: PowerPnt.exe /S c:\demo.pptx

That opens PowerPoint and starts the presentation!

Insert Web Content into PowerPoint

Lastly, we wanted to include some live web pages in it, which PowerPoint doesn’t support out of the box. MVPs to the rescue! Some MVPs created an add-in that allows it: http://skp.mvps.org/liveweb.htm

Really awesome!