Preconfiguring a Predefined Participant  Environment

Note: To use CloudShare's Preconfiguring a Predefined Participant Environment feature, contact your Account Manager.

This article describes how to preconfigure a predefined participant’s environment, ensuring that at login, the student has a ready-to-use setup customized to their requirements. A Predefined Participant is a participant whose name and email were known in advance and whom the instructor has already added as a user of the experience.

1. Verify that the experience whose environment you want to preconfigure has been created with the Preconfigured Participant Environments option turned on, as described in Creating an Experience with a Preconfigured Participant Environment. This option cannot be enabled after the experience has been created, even if the experience has not yet started
2. On the CloudShare Home page, select Training from the left-hand menu to display a list of previously created Training experiences.
3. Click on an experience’s name in the Experience Name column. To display the Experience’s page, which lists the users defined for this experience. 
4. Click the + Add users button on the top right to display the following dropdown menu:

5. Select the Participant option from the dropdown menu. The following window appears, allowing the addition of a new participant to this experience in the usual manner. 

6. Click the Save button. The new participant’s row is added to the experience’s user list, as shown below: 

The Role column shows PARTICIPANT. 

The Environment Status column now shows a + Create button, which indicates that the environment has not been created yet. 

7. Click the + Create button to create a Preconfigured Participant Environment. 
   CloudShare automatically spins up (PREPARING) a new environment for this unassigned user, and then soon after, the Environment Status column shows READY. 

7. Reconfigure the environment as necessary. For example, an instructor can open the environment and add a virtual machine tailored to a participant’s lab role or provide a different Microsoft 365 subscription key to each participant’s environment. 
   To reconfigure the environment, click the View / Configure button, which opens this environment in the Participants Viewer as an instructor. From there, the instructor can edit the environment.
8. To conserve resources and avoid unnecessary load, suspend preconfigured environments after you finish reconfiguring them. 

Suspended environments will resume automatically when the assigned participant logs in to the experience, as well as when the View / Configure button is clicked or the environment is resumed by clicking the Resume button.

This user definition and its environment remain unassigned until a user who is not yet defined for the experience logs in to the experience.

When a participant logs in to the experience, the name of one unassigned user automatically changes to the username (email) used to log in. That participant is added to the user list and, from that point on, treated like any predefined participant .

Note: When an undefined participant logs in to an experience and is assigned an undefined user’s environment, the environment’s usage policy starts counting down from that moment. For example, for a week.

Note: If no participant is ever assigned to an unassigned user that was created, that unassigned user (and its environment) expires when its environment’s policy’s remaining time runs out.

Note: Guided Journeys and Multi-Step Experiences are also reset when assigned to a user, ensuring each user gets a fresh start in their Guided Journey and Multi-Step Experience.

Note: The maximum number of participants that can be added to an experience is defined in the Maximum Number of Students field when the Training experience is created. Unassigned users are included in this count.