Citrix Published App Deployment

In line with an upgrade of our Standard Operating Environment, we are looking at the options for reducing the load and footprint on our clients (and therefore not have to fork out the dosh to upgrade the client PCs).

One option is to extend our use of Citrix Metaframe XP and deploy One World to the end users via a Published Application. The client would be a Win2K professional machine with Office Apps installed locally.

What issues have others come across when doing this ?
Mostly, I am concerned about functional limitations such as the import / export for Excel not working because the Published App can't find the locally installed Office Apps.
Is this the case ?
What else breaks ?

NOTE : After the upgrade we will be on One World Xe SP19.1 with Update 6 and the client PCs will have Win2K and Office XP.

Regards,

CAMO

Camo,

The way around that is to install Excel on the same Citrix server that OneWorld is installed on. I'm a staunch believer in using Citrix Metaframe to deploy OneWorld for it's reliability, performance, and ease of administration. We've been using it for years with few problems. Just make sure that each user has a terminal server home directory set up in their profile or you may run into problems with old or outdated jde.ini files.

Camo,

We're using Citrix Metaframe 1.8 with Microsoft Office 2000 Pro loaded on
each Citrix box (even though all client PCs have Office 2000 Pro loaded
locally). This works out very well and there is no need to even publish the
Excel app. When a user exports to Excel, the application opens seamlessly,
it even appears to the user that it is their local copy. To make things
even more seamless for our users, we have set their terminal server home
directory to their "normal" PC home directory on our file server. We also
checked with Microsoft on licensing, and were told that we only have to
license the one copy of Office that we load on each Citrix server as long as
each PC already has a licensed copy locally.

Regards,
Terry

Terry Manley
I.T. Specialist
Timken Super Precision
603-352-0310 x431
[email protected]
Xe SP17.1, Update 2 (soon to be SP 19 and Update 6), AS400,
NT 4.0 Dep server
Citrix Metaframe 1.8, load balanced, on NT 4.0 TSE

Cam,
There is only one thing that is a problem with using Citrix boxes. When loading new OW code the Citrix server must be in Install mode and users are not allowed to execute any applications at that time. Having multiple Citrix servers can ease that problem.
Beyond that one item, Citrix is a wonderful thing and will save you many, many hours of maintenance to those fat clients.
Regards,
Dave

Re: RE: Citrix Published App Deployment

If accessing One World via a published app, how have you passed the user credentials to the Citrix logon session.
I remember reading about some problems with AutoLogon.
Do the users have to logon using their NT login again, or are you successfully automatically passing their ID and password to the Citrix server ??????

Re: RE: Citrix Published App Deployment

Cam,
I have two heads ups for you.
First, you should be very aware of printing/printer drivers.
It will workeven with local printers as long as the exact same drivers are on both the client and the Citrix server.

Second, give Unified logon a look it saved us almost 1/5 of our help calls.