The CloudShare Viewer is a powerful, intuitive browser-based, self-contained portal that renders training and sales experiences and environments. It enables access to:
- Virtual Machines (VMs) and external resources (such as public clouds) that have been set up.
- Additional content and resources, when provided, such as an overview of the lab, Instructions, files, and so on.
- Built-in video conferencing features.
- Tools for collaboration - including chat and personal assistance features - when available.
The Viewer enables experience participants to access their own environment. The Viewer also enables environment designers to view environments to ensure a productive virtual lab experience.
The Editor is the admin tool that helps you create the experience your end-user interacts with via the Viewer.
Each experience and environment can have its own viewer customizations, and these customizations can be copied to a new experience by duplicating the original experience.
The initial state of the customization within an experience is inherited from the blueprint customizations, or the previously duplicated experience; however, any customization made within an experience does not get saved back to the blueprint.
This section will help project members get started with the CloudShare Viewer customizations and maximize its features.
CloudShare lets any user with sufficient role permissions customize the Viewer from two levels:
- Environment Level. Customize the Viewer in the blueprint. You can optionally store your customization in the snapshot to make it available for all current and future instances of the environment.
- Experience Level. Apply specific customization for a specific experience.
To start customizing the Viewer:
On the Experience Level
Click on an experience in the experience list on the CloudShare home page, and then click the Editor button at the top right, as shown below:
On the Environment Level
- Click the Infrastructure button.
- Click the Environments List tab from the left menu and select the environment for which you want to capture a snapshot. Note that the environment must be active.
- Click the Viewer button at the top right, as shown below:
The following sections describe how to customize the Viewer:
- Managing Tabs. At the top of the participant’s workspace, tabs consist of virtual machines and content that your experience includes.
- VM Settings. Customize one or more specific options for a VM in your environment.
- VM list: This option shows participants a list of all VMs within the environment, providing quick access to VM-specific actions.
- Content Items: An Experience Designer can choose from various objects to deliver different types of content, such as:
- Overview Page: This page is often used to introduce users to the environment and experience. Designers can add multiple pages as they can be highly customized to display other content (using WYSIWYG or HTML).
- External URL. This allows you to frame content hosted on a publicly accessible website or pop out the website content into a new browser tab.
- Resources. Make various types of content and resources (such as small files) available to users.
- Guided Journey. Enables Experience Designers to organize course content into sections, enabling participants to access relevant materials for each section and follow the steps throughout their course.
- Visual AI Checks. As part of the Guided Journey, Experience Designers can create sanity checks to ensure that participants meet specific criteria for each section; these checks are systematically evaluated and recorded.
- Appearance: Allows Experience Designers to change the look and feel of an experience for end users, which includes:
- Branding. Customize the CloudShare Viewer with your unique branding.
- Student Login. Customize the experience login page and the information users submit to access your experiences.
- Collaboration Tools. Various tools for your experience, including class chat, instructor chat, Assist Me (including Slack integration), and video conferencing.
Note: When editing an experience that is In Progress, you will see a warning outlining that any changes will immediately affect your participants.