With the ubiquity of portable electronic devices such as personal digital assistants, cellular telephones, and laptops, as well as increasing dependency on e-mail and other aspects of the internet, situations often arise in which a person will need to print or scan documents, photos, or the like. While public places may offer Internet access, these typically do not offer printing and other services that users may need. Kiosks may be configured to provide self-service public access to services such as printing and scanning in public areas.
While printing from such kiosks, in many instances, a user may need to access and/or download documents to be printed from cloud storage services (e.g., XEROX Docushare® GoogleDrive®, Dropbox®, MICROSOFT OneDrive®, etc.), and the delivery of documents using general-purpose web-browsers has become a practical requirement in such environments. Web browsers are typically flexible and open programs which aid the user in navigating the Internet, running programs or applets, and giving the user full control over what he/she is doing. However, for a kiosk system which is utilized by numerous users, providing access to the web may create problems because the control regions of the browser may have menu choices which permit a user to alter the settings of the browser. In a kiosk device where uniformity and predictability of use is essential to achieving self-service, having menu choices which permit modification of the desired settings poses significant problems. Moreover, a user can access any content accessible via the Internet which does not further the goal of the business which has established the kiosk and may cause system failure, hamper customer turnaround time, etc. As such, the user should not have full control and open access.
“Web wraps” may enable a kiosk to be limited to displaying only preset web pages. For example, a bookshop might provide a kiosk for accessing its on-line catalogue across the internet but block access to internet pages other than those within its own site. However, web wraps are ineffective if a user needs to access outside Internet pages to access or download documents and/or for authentication purposes.
This document describes a system that may address at least some of the issues described above.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds