Operating system related considerations

This topic is to alert you to, and to describe, the steps you need to take to successfully install, deploy and run FrontVue with regards to the operating system platform and its security features. The steps are not specific to FrontVue, however you are liable to encounter them as you install, deploy and run the software on a target computer.

User Account Control

By default, for security reasons, operating systems display a dialog whenever a user action requires a privilege elevation, for example when installing a program. This feature is designed to prevent undesired actions from being executed by background processes such as virus, spyware and other potentially harmful programs.

Accept the user privilege elevation if you are at the origin of the action and approve it.

 FrontVue complies with the User Account Control feature. It is strongly recommended to keep it enabled at all times, for installing, configuring, deploying or running the application.

User privileges for installation

The user that installs FrontVue must have Administrator privileges. This is mandatory for the installation process to execute properly.

You must acknowledge the User Account Control (UAC) privilege elevation for the installation process to run correctly.

Windows operating systems have a security feature called Data Execution Prevention (DEP) to help prevent damage from viruses and other security threats.

At startup, FrontVue overrides the system-wide policy by attempting to automatically disable DEP for FrontVue.exe. The system DEP policy setting must be OptIn (default setting for Windows client versions), OptOut (default setting for Windows Server versions), or AlwaysOff.
If the system DEP policy is AlwaysOn, the FrontVue application returns an error on startup and then stop. In such a case, you should contact your system administrator.

User permissions for the installation folders

The Windows user account that runs FrontVue must have the Modify Permission for the installation folders, including:

  • The root folder of Program, Projects and Shared Libraries. That is the topmost folder of the FrontVue Path

There may be differences in default permissions depending on the operating systems, in particular desktop OS vs server OS. It also and mainly depends on the target partition and folder (system partition vs other partitions).

In most cases, permissions need to be changed because the installation was run by an administrator user account and the software will be run afterward with standard user accounts.

For this reason, it is strongly recommended to create a dedicated User Group for all Windows user accounts that are due to run the software. This allows for setting permissions on the installation folders once, and ease user account changes. In addition, it securely isolates who can affect FrontVue files.

A tool is provided with FrontVue that can be used to view the permissions of the current User on selected folders. The tool is named ViewEffectivePermissions.exe and is found in FrontVue \Program folder.

Running FrontVue 

During start-up, FrontVue checks that permissions and security features are set correctly for the most common uses.

For security reasons, it is strongly recommended to apply the least privilege principle by not running FrontVue with Windows administrator privileges.

If you have several versions of FrontVue on the same computer, you must register the components every time when switching from one version to another version, using the Component Registration tool. See below for more information.

The start-up of FrontVue will be aborted if one of the following element is not set accordingly: Permissions, DEP exception, missing or incorrectly registered components.

Registering a Previously Installed Version

This procedure is only necessary if you have two or more versions of FrontVue installed on the same computer.

When you install FrontVue, its components are registered with Windows. If there was another version of FrontVue already installed, its registration is overwritten and it may no longer function correctly.

To overcome this problem a Component Registration utility is supplied with each version of FrontVue. Each time that you want to run a different installed version of FrontVue, the corresponding Component Registration utility must be run first. A shortcut to the utility can be found on the Windows desktop and in the Start menu: Start.Program Files.FrontVue.Tools.Component Registration. ClosedShow picture