Hey everyone! I've recently been tasked with rebuilding a programming lab for kids, which currently has 17 PCs using Unity and similar tools. We have a setup with two shared accounts (tutor and student), and while it works fine for the most part, the hardware is pretty outdated. The infrastructure team is suggesting we use Intune and Entra, but I'm not sure that's the best fit given our shared account situation and the cleanup mess that can happen with duplicate objects. Plus, device-only licenses don't include things like Defender or telemetry, and WAN-first seems off for our local setup. I'm an Intune guy, but I'm having trouble seeing how it all fits together in this half-cloud, half-on-prem environment. I'd love to hear what setups others are using that work well in a shared lab. Thanks!
5 Answers
Why use shared accounts at all? In a setting like this, having each student sign in with their credentials, even temporarily, can save a lot of confusion and make tracking easier.
Look into Deep Freeze for resetting machines after each use. A public library I helped set up uses this with great success. It’s not the easiest, but it definitely keeps things fresh!
Having done something similar, having a consistent setup really reduces chaos!
I run labs with Intune and it's been working great! We use SharePoint for file shares, mapped directly in file explorer, and we don’t rely on shared accounts. If it doesn’t strictly need to be managed by Intune, I’d skip it. Your specific needs should dictate your process.
True, but once you set it up, it reduces a lot of maintenance hassles in the long run!
That's interesting, but isn't Intune a bit overkill for a small kids' lab like this?
You might want to explore ephemeral instances. Consider spinning up fresh instances for each lesson and then trashing them after. This works great in theory with containers but hasn’t been tested much with Windows environments.
That could save loads of hassle! I’ve seen similar setups with schools in France.
I love the idea of a fresh start every session — no residual junk clogging things up!
Have you thought about setting up kiosk devices with Intune? It might streamline things a bit, though I've heard it can be tricky.
Yeah, but I’ve heard mixed reviews about the experience; it's not always smooth sailing.
Totally agree. For public PCs, we use software that resets everything after each session.