Windows Education license - Open lab scenario/Best Practice?

[Jorgisven]

I've read the "Getting GameMaker Studio 2 for Education" and am scratching my head on how to manage the seats in an open lab scneario. What I'm stuck on are two main points:

• "Once a seat ID has been used to log in to GameMaker Studio 2, both the seat ID and the computer running the GMS2 IDE will be linked, and you cannot use the seat ID to log in to GMS2 on any other machine."
  
• I don't see any way to prevent users from signing out of these seats in a public, multi-user lab scenario, for which there is no direct oversight/management nearby.

Further, the first point doesn't quite line up with my testing. I'm just trying to understand how to manage the seats when multiple people use the same seat, and signing in and out of accounts is not an option (too time-consuming when every seat must be unique). Further complicating this issue is I have no real way to reset the username (in case someone forgets the username) without deleting the username entirely, confounding documentation efforts for multiple teachers.

I tried opening a support ticket on Jan 25, but have still received no response, even after pinging the ticket on the 31st.

Any thoughts for best practice in this scenario?

 

[ThatTechGuy]

As above, I am in a similar situation.

We are waiting to buy a number of licenses for labs, and have opened a support ticket to get clarification on the issue. No response for a few days now.

Would love to hear how any other schools are currently using it in a school lab..

 

[FrostyCat]

Since this has gone on for several days without official response, I will chime in with my own opinion.

Disclaimer: As I am only a regular user with no actual access to the educational version, this post should not be construed as official advice.

I don't see any way to prevent users from signing out of these seats in a public, multi-user lab scenario, for which there is no direct oversight/management nearby.

If you have a public lab with no direct oversight nearby, DeepFreeze is a must-have for keeping system-level configurations intact. I'm not sure how well DeepFreeze would work with GMS 2 Educational (if at all), but my hope is that a "frozen" drive would automatically log back in upon restart.

In the long run, having a password-protected logout is in order for the educational version, since your use case definitely isn't unique. I would recommend filing a request for this feature and also referencing your original ticket to get help for that one as well.

Further, the first point doesn't quite line up with my testing. I'm just trying to understand how to manage the seats when multiple people use the same seat, and signing in and out of accounts is not an option (too time-consuming when every seat must be unique). Further complicating this issue is I have no real way to reset the username (in case someone forgets the username) without deleting the username entirely, confounding documentation efforts for multiple teachers.

Is an unattended script running the setups? If there is, you can consider putting machine ID-account credential mappings into a hidden database, then have your script read the account credentials from that database when setting up. That way each seat would automatically log in with its own credentials, and if you need to revoke a username, just remove it from the database and re-run the provision.

 

[Tsa05]

You're not planning to have GMS re-install each time someone logs in, right?
The seat license is as though the computer itself (hardware ID) has claimed the license. As long as the same computer keeps trying to use the software, it's good. So, every student who sits down to use your lab computer has access.

It's not like a managed license pool where each concurrent user checks out a license and checks it back in upon logoff. Rather, each computer has the license checked out. We've not yet run into the scenario where we replace all the computers in the lab, so can't help there; the rest works fine though.