Planning For Deployment

When a computer is activated as a hot desk computer, it will support multiple ZeeDrive users , but, only one user at a time. The ZeeDrive Subscription Administrator is responsible for activating the computer as a hot desk computer, not the end users.

Hot desk computers can be activated manually via the wizard, or automatically via the ZeeDrive command line.

After activating the computer as a hot desk computer, a user signing on to the computer will see ZeeDrive start up automatically and map their network drives.

Licencing And Licenced Users

A Shared Computer licence is required to activate a hot desk computer. The licence is assigned to the computer during the activation process. The relationship between Shared Computer licence and hot desk computer is one to one. E.g. if you activate 10 hot desk computers you will require 10 Shared Computer licences.

ZeeDrive will only start-up successfully for licenced users. A licenced user is a user that has been set up on the ZeeDrive subscription with either a Personal Computer User licence or Shared Computer User licence.

A hot desk computer supports only one active ZeeDrive user at a time. If another user signs in to the computer at the same time as another user, then the existing user will have their ZeeDrive session invalidated as the new user's ZeeDrive session will become the active one.

Username Resolution

After the hot desk computer has been activated, when users sign in to the computer, ZeeDrive will start-up automatically and attempt to identify the user to validate they are set-up on the associated ZeeDrive subscription. For further information on the automatic identification process and how ZeeDrive handles the case where identification fails, please refer to Username Resolution in the desktop server section.

Fully Automate Deployment

Activation of a hot desk computer can be achieved automatically via use of the ZeeDrive command line. And, if you have a software deployment tool such as Microsoft Intune, you can integrate the command line in to the deployment tool for a fully managed deployment experience.

Automated activation may be appealing where you have many hot desk computers to activate and wish to avoid manual activation via the wizard.

If your organisation prefers to avoid end users manually activating their personal computers with ZeeDrive, you may consider activating all your computers as hot desk computers via the command line whether they are personal computers or hot desk computers.

E.g. when your organisation provisions a computer for a new employee, the automated activation of ZeeDrive on the computer could be integrated in to your existing provisioning process.

To facilitate the automated installation and activation of ZeeDrive on hot desk computers, the zeedrive.exe executable supports a silent/headless execution mode via command line parameters.

Before you can activate a hot desk computer via the command line, you will first need to enable command line activation.

Refer to Activating A Hot Desk Computer in the command line guide for more information on the command line syntax.

If your organisation uses Microsoft Intune, you can leverage the ZeeDrive command line to activate ZeeDrive from Intune. A full guide to deploy ZeeDrive on hot desk computers with Intune is available here.

If you have an issue activating via the command line, check the activation results log file.