GAFE & Chromebooks - Lock down 1 user to 1 device

[CAWJames]

Morning all,

 

As alluded to in the title, is it possible for me to create a load of accounts in google admin and then assign 1 to each of our chromebooks, and only allow that account to that chromebook. We don't have students in the system, and we thought we could use 1 user for all chromebooks, which we can, but it causes problems in drive, as everyone starts sharing the same file!!

 

Any insights or fixes to this problem(don't really want to import all the students into GAFE, and have yet another non-synced system(we don't have them in AD either, so no simple sync)),

 

Thanks

 

James

[fiza]

Can I ask why you want 1 user to 1 Chromebook? It's all cloud based so no user data is left no the device that the next user can get access to. How many student accounts are you going to create?

[theeggmaster]

I agree with fiza. Give the students their own accounts and let them use whichever Chromebook they like. You can do a CSV upload to do them in bulk.

[theeggmaster]

You can restrict a Chromebook to only allow a certain user to log in by using the 'Restrict Sign-in to list of users' option, but you'll have to create a separate OU for each Chromebook to get different users for each Chromebook...

[CAWJames]

Thanks for the input, we can't(don't want to) add the students with an upload, they only exist in a bespoke SQL database that runs our home built MIS, it's asp.net based and as such no password data can be pulled over and as the students already have their moodle numbers for VLE access(from the SQL), and an Office365 account, we don't want to muddy that with a further log in.

 

In terms of 1 chromebook, 1 login, we can't have one account for all, due to Drive doing fun things with multiple users on same account.

 

I know we are cludging it, but 160 logins for 160 chromebooks, was really the best option we came up with, in terms of time to accomplish and how much admin would be needed afterwards(without a sync, student specific logins would be far more of an ar*e, as we have students starting and finishing all the time, not a fixed amount at start of year/term)

[FN-GM]

What is it you want to do on the Chromebooks? Is it just basic web browsing? You could put them into Kiosk mode so there won't be any login required.

[CAWJames]

Yep, that is the current idea, my tech is currently working on Kiosk mode and a selection of apps. Then it should wipe user data on logoff and hopefully keep the apps, as at the moment they are set to wipe all on logoff(no granularisation on that one that I can find) and it takes ages and plus de bandwidth to reinstall them on startup.

[FN-GM]

You shouldn't need to do a full wipe?

[CAWJames]

The only option we can find in the policy is to delete all data on logoff, so not a full wipe, but it does remove all user data and the apps that are applied, which is annoying

[FN-GM]

It shouldn't take long to put the apps back on. We do this for all our Chromebooks and the apps appear within a couple of seconds.

[CAWJames]

Ours takes precious minutes, when students are wondering where word is and then complain! We are only sending over Word, Excel, Powerpoint and VMWare Horizon. Seconds would be lovely! What policy section are you using to send them out? Might be more ways to skin a cat, and I'm using the wrong one!