Hei hei,

As the title states, I am running into issues with the license of users who have a mandatory profile assigned to them. Effectively, whenever they log off a computer, the SCA license that they have just activated gets removed and is no longer available requiring a new activation round.

The environment for the students is: multiple datarooms with laptops & desktops, students do not have a permanent pc. All students have a mandatory profile updated for Windows 8.1. Office 365 is installed with Shared Computer Activation. We do not (yet) use Federated services for SSO between our Domain and Tenant.

Students activate O365 once they logon and this then also connects up their Onedrive area. When they logoff we have seen that their authentication token for O365 does not get retained in "%Users%\<username>\%appdata%\roaming\microsoft\credentials" - the expected TXT files are missing. And under Credential Manager in the Control Panel, there is no credentials stored for the user to "MicrosoftOffice15"

Looking in the registry at "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\15.0\ClickToRun\Configuration" I can see that the ShareComputerLicense = 1.

I have so far only confirmed that changing a user from a Mandatory profile to a Local profile does retain the license, but I would prefer NOT to have a local profile of each student on a pc...

Does anyone have any suggestions on:

1) Retaining a license for a period of time?

 Ideally we would avoid using a KMS/MAC based Office 2013 license to resolve this issue.

Not sure if this is mandatory profile's default behavior...

I just went through this article: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn782859.aspx

As the SharedComputerLicensing = 1, it means that shared computer activation is enabled; there is no txt file, it seems to say the activation is failed.

I suppose you need someone who experienced the same to confirm this.

-Jeff

I think the reality of Mandatory profiles is that you CAN'T retain information like this. That is what they are intended for, so that a user cannot change their settings and make them persistent.

I would undo the profile being mandatory (I think this is done just by changing the file extension on the user.dat file from memory). Assuming each user has their own roaming profile set to mandatory (renaming the registry file) I would be inclined to make them all standard roaming profiles whilst the user logs in, and then after the profile changes are made switch them back (rename the registry file again).

I've come to the same conclusion.

By using the Mandatory profile, any setting or change performed by the user is only temporary and resets after logoff. Since the license token is stored in the "%Users%\<username>\%appdata%\roaming\microsoft\credentials" area, this gets nullified with a logoff and needs to be reset at logon.

I've removed Mandatory profiles from all students and this seems to allow for the user to come back to the same machine and not get requested for a new license. (at least until a refresh is needed)

I've also confirmed what MS has said about the nature of SCA: its on a per user (unique) per pc basis. Which is unfortunate, but this should get resolved once ADFF is in place.

• Marked as answer by ABAdmin 20 hours 23 minutes ago
• Unmarked as answer by ABAdmin 20 hours 7 minutes ago

Strange though...I am still seeing this AFTER a user has authenticated their license/ account and I have blocked off the internet (in an exam scenario).

By rights, the program is licensed - as indicated by the logon account from earlier, but why does the license not carry over when it is stored locally on the authenticated user and internet access is blocked? This is the exact scenario for SCA - license is active, no access to internet, but program functionality remains.