Collect email addresses in an event lobby

Question

My company hosts an educational event. During which, there's a segment where our guests' family members are sort of milling around a lobby, enjoying free food and mingling. During this, we want to have a laptop set up where family members can input their email address and be added to our mailing list.

I'd prefer to have the screen locked so they can't manipulate the computer or exit out of whichever program we use to collect the data. It doesn't have to be super secure (most are parents without a lot of IT knowledge or desire to mess with our laptop).

Does anyone know any software that would allow us to do this? My plan B is to just create a simple web page with a form, but I thought there might be a better option.

Answer 1

I personally would do a web page form, but if you have Microsoft Access you could create a form and database with that and it might work better for what your looking to do.

Answer 2

You could try utilising something like OpenKiosk to lock down the PC http://openkiosk.sourceforge.net/

Answer 3

If your guests and their families have business cards, you might get one of these CardScan systems:

http://sites.dymo.com/Solutions/Pages/Seg_cat_lndg.aspx?cat=CardScanCMS(DYMO)&locale=enUS

The workflow would be to ask everyone to place their business card in the scanner. About 4 seconds later, the card is returned. There may be a requirement to click "OK" after each card, or adjust the timeout on "batch" entry mode.