We’re currently deploying Surface GO 2 tables in “kiosk” mode to run Tulip player. This works great for areas where we don’t already have computers available but now we’re deploying into areas/workstations that already have computers.
Not to put too fine of a point on it, but it’s dumb to deploy a $2000 kiosk in an area which already has a computer, but to my knowledge, system wide installs of Tulip Player aren’t available and I’m not creating a station for every person that logs into the same computer. It’s not scalable or practical to keep up with.
Installing player to c:\ProgramData so it is available to all users. This is on the roadmap and should land this year. This will enable player to be installed just once for all users. Right now it needs to be installed for each user.
Once player is installed, share the station across all windows users. There is a feature flag we can enable for you so one station is used across all user profiles on a single machine. Can you reach out to support@tulip.co so they can flip this flag for you.
can i ask how you are running Kiosk mode on your Surface go 2?
we currently have a go 3 and I’m not able to run it on kiosk mode as its a Win32 app and kiosk mode only supports UMP apps.
did you find a way around this or are you using paid third party software?
Hey @Pete_Hartnett
Any update on this? it’s been a pain point recently as we have lots of cross-trained operators, so many people can do many different things at many work stations. So been doing lots of installing lately
With the feature flag @Richard-SNN called out, player needs to be installed for each user profile but will be treated as a single station within Tulip. All new instances have this flag on, but for many legacy customers, we could not turn this on without a meaningful impact on operations.
An MSI image for Player is in the works (which would allow one install per machine), but comes with some drawbacks (like auto-updates for player likely won’t be possible). We expect this to be available towards the tail end of the summer.
This a newly-discovered major pain point for us, so great to find this thread clarifying the limitations. In our customer case, there are up to 20-30 operators in the factory and they hot-desk at fixed workstations where they log in as their own windows user ID. Right now it seems unmanageable to ask a user to log into all work stations just to cover where they might work in future. We will keep watching for the MSI version and would like to try it out immediately it is available.
I was looking for additional information on this topic as this is something I have tried to get set up at our company independently (We have shared accounts for some functions, but these accounts are limited to LAN only for security reasons. Only user-specific accounts have wifi access, which means many installs)
I can confirm that after manually moving the install location into the C: drive that the player will still work, but fails to auto-update when logged in as anyone besides the original-installer. I assume this is probably related to the other accounts not having admin permissions? I am not an Windows account management wizard by any means, so I can’t say if there’s an effective workaround for this.
@Pete_Hartnett
Hey Pete,
If the msi installer is used, should the Tulip player show up for all subsequent users that sign in to the PC? We’ve had issues with new employees starting at the Tulip player is not available on the PC even though the msi installer was used.
However, it installs like Discord, meaning the MSI installer just installs the “installer”.
The actual installs are per user so they may take a minute or two for the icon to show up. If it’s not then perhaps something is preventing the user install.
Hi, From version 2.4.0 (released on Sep 2023), the MSI installer for Tulip Player is a standard MSI installer that can install to C:\Program Files and be available to all Window users.
The install location can be customized through the standard MSI installer interface or using command line args. See Tulip Player enterprise deployments for more info.
The Discord style MSI installer was a initial pilot that was shared with a select few customers.
Yes, with the MSI installer (2.4.0 or higher) it is expected that Tulip Player shows up for all users of the PC if it is installed to the default location. What version of the Tulip Player do you have? If you can reproduce this, please reach out to support@tulip.co and we’ll investigate.
Hi, From version 2.4.0 (released on Sep 2023), the MSI installer for Tulip Player is a standard MSI installer that can install to C:\Program Files and be available to all Window users.
The install location can be customized through the standard MSI installer interface or using command line args. See Tulip Player enterprise deployments for more info.
Yes, the Windows user installing the MSI should be an Administrator. You might be able to install it as a standard user with some Windows Group Policy but we have not tested it.
@hari I think this is where we were running into a problem. We would run the msi installer under a standard user with admin credentials to override. It would distribute the installer to any user who had previously logged in, but no future new users who logged into that PC.
