A CloudShare sponsored link generates and opens an environment of your design and logs the user into the environment. The user does not need to log into CloudShare or use the CloudShare's web UI.

With a simple request to the CloudShare REST API, your website can generate a sponsored link based on a prototype environment that you prepared and serve the environment to your prospective customer.

The link works within a defined time period and the environment lasts as long as you decide. You can choose to suspend the environment automatically after any period of inactivity. As always with CloudShare, you only pay for the resources you actually use.

A typical flow for a web based controlled trial looks like this:

As you can see in the flow, a simple call to our API returns a token that lets you redirect trial users to their own personal product trials. 

The first thing you need to do is to prepare a prototype trial environment. Create a CloudShare environment and set it up to run your product exactly as you want your trial users to experience your product. When the environment is ready to use as a prototype, take a snapshot. The blueprint that contains the snapshot you took will serve as the prototype for the trial environments.

You also need to make sure you have an environment policy defined as you want for the trial environments. The policy controls the total runtime and storage time for each environment, and what happens to each environment after a period of inactivity.

You'll need the ID of your blueprint, policy and the region the blueprint is stored on.

You might like to stay logged into CloudShare and simply append some of our REST API's GET functions to the URL.

For the project ID:

Using the project ID, invoke the following functions to get the remaining IDs you need:

If you want the environments served to be owned by a specific project member, you'll also need the project member's ID. If you don't specify this, the request caller ID is used automatically. You can retrieve project member IDs (and all of the above IDs too) by calling the OPTIONS /api/v3/sponsoredlinks API function. Project members are returned under owningProjectMembers in the response.

Call POST /api/v3/sponsoredlinks to generate the sponsored link. 

For example:

POST /api/v3/sponsoredlinks
{
    "email": "Wain45@spam.me",
    "FirstName": "Wain",
    "LastName": "Smith",
    "JobTitle": "manager",
    "PhoneNumber": "012-345678",
    "Company": "Wain's Company",
    "PolicyId": "POLs3J1NEAESn7ipYMwYq20Q2",
    "BlueprintId": "BPitsTtiUS27hEsHcVZcZsxw2",
    "UseLatestSnapshot": false,
    "ExpirationMinutes": 15,
    "regionId": "REKolD1-ab84YIxODeMGob9A2",
    "allowMultipleUsages": false
}

Once your trial is underway, you can take a look at the engagement level through the CloudShare WebUI.