Introduction

Preconfigured Participant Environments enable instructors to set up (preconfigure) individual participant environments up to two weeks before an experience (Training or Sales) begins. These preconfigured environments ensure that every participant enters the experience with the required software configuration in place, allowing the session to start smoothly and enabling instructors to focus on guidance rather than setup. For example, an instructor can add a virtual machine tailored to a participant's lab role or provide a different Microsoft 365 subscription key to each participant's environment.

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When Should a Preconfigured Participant Environment Be Used?

If all or some of a session’s participants require an environment configuration that is tailored to individual participants (and that differs from the Blueprint on which the experience is based), then using a Preconfigured Participant Environment ensures that every student logs in to a ready-to-use setup without needing setup help.  

Note: If every participant can work in an environment that is identical to the one automatically generated by the experience’s Blueprint, then there’s no need to preconfigure an environment for specific students, as described in this article.

This feature is enabled by a toggle in the Experience Creation wizard.

Note: Preconfigured Participant Environments must be enabled in the Experience Creation wizard when the experience is created. You cannot enable or change this option after the experience has been created, even if the experience has not yet started.

Note: This article uses Training experiences as examples. The same guidance applies to Sales experiences.

See Creating an Experience with a Preconfigured Participant Environment.

Methods for Preconfiguring Participant Environments

There are two ways to set up Preconfigured Participant Environments: 

• For Predefined Participants: These are participants whose details (names and emails) are known in advance. Instructors create each participant in the Training Experience page, create and configure that participant’s environment, so that it is automatically assigned to this user when they log in. See Preconfiguring a Predefined Participant Environment.
• For Undefined Participants: These are participants whose details (name/email) are not known before the session. Instructors can create multiple unassigned user placeholder environments and configure them. When an undefined student logs in to the experience, they are automatically assigned one of these placeholder users and its designated environment and are automatically added as a user of this experience. See Preconfiguring an Undefined Participant Environment. 

Provisioning Environments Across Multiple Regions

If an experience's participants are spread across different geographic locations, an instructor can make Preconfigured Participant Environments available in more than one region. This lets each participant's environment be provisioned close to them, instead of all environments defaulting to a single region.

• When creating the experience, the instructor selects which regions are available for that experience (see Creating an Experience with a Preconfigured Participant Environment).
• When preconfiguring each participant's environment — whether Predefined or Undefined — the instructor selects which of these regions that specific environment is provisioned in.
• When an undefined participant logs in and is due to be automatically matched to an unassigned environment, they select the region/country they are connecting from, and CloudShare assigns them to the unassigned environment provisioned in the closest-matching region.

Note: Once an experience is created, the list of available regions cannot be changed.