Surgient Success

Session sharing is often a confusing point for our users and I find I get plenty of questions in regards to it.  Thus, I decided that someone, certainly, would benefit from an overview.  

 1.  When you share a session, it puts a copy of that session on the selected user(s) lab/demo page.

 2.  Only an SE Admin can act upon the original session (schedule it) - other users just get to poke around.  Another SE Admin can even cancel/change the owner's schedule of that demo/lab.

 3.  If it's a "full" or "resources only" share, and the owner schedules it, other users will be able to access the VM when it is available.  If it is just a "copy only" share, a user will get as far as the launch pad for the session, but not actually be able to access the VM.  It looks a bit misleading if you don't read carefully (like me).

 4.  The copy button (when in "full" or "copy only" share) exists on the overview page.  A user can have his own app session by clicking this.  He is then free to manipulate that instance as he would a lab/demo he created himself.

Hopefully this is helpful.  If not, pretend, and leave me to my disillusions.

 Jackie. 

Hi Jackie:

This is indeed helpful, but I have a question as an administrator who has divided his user community into peer child organization (i.e. R&D, Support, Services, etc.) for resource quota reasons, but would like to permit the users of each child organization to share their sessions across the child organization (i.e. a Support user will want to share their session with an R&D user).

By default, the sharing can only happen within an organization. How can I grant this access?

Thanks and regards.

Hi Lou -

The purpose behind organizations is to specifically silo your users, which is why sharing is restricted in that way.  If you want users to see users from other organizations, there is no real clean way to do this as far as I know (and engineering is welcome to chime in with better or alternate suggestions).  You can do one of two things that I'm aware of:

1.  The Tester would have to be in the Users group of the other organization in order to see a list of other Testers in that organization that he may share to.  However, this would also permit him to see any application configurations that the Users group from Org 2 has permission to see.

I tried to put the user in the restricted users group of the organization, but this doesn't solve the problem.

2.  You can give each user "user" permissions over the account of each user that he should be permitted to share to.  This gives him viewing rights of that user account and he'll see it from the share menu.   

Note that users can share to groups.  Thus, if you put both users in a group in Org 2, the user in Org2 will be able to see and share to that entire group, although he will still not be able to see the individual members of that group (unless you do step 1 or step 2).

Good luck....

Jackie

 Hi Jackie:

The groups, once again, were the key to the solution. By adding the "R&D Users" Group to a user who is in the "Support Users" Group, permits a Support person to share their session with one or more members of the R&D Users for collaboration.

I applied this across the board using as a batch script applying the vcsadmin command for each user that requires cross-organization sharing capability:

accountmod -groupadd <targetgroup> -grouporg <targetgroup's organization> -organization <account organization> accountName

e.g. accountmod -groupadd "R&D Users" -grouporg "R&D" -organization "Support" joeschmoe

and it worked splendidly.

Once again, you pointed me in the right direction for the solution. Thank you!