Citrix presentation server and ms office best practice - especially for laptop users, in the Citrix XenApp / Presentation Server forum on BrianMadden.com

Hi Blair,

The basic idea of the technology is remote access to centralized data. That makes a huge lot of sense for corporate applications, which really ought to include email. Office applications are a bit more difficult insofar as the main advantages are integration with corporate applications and document management.

You've got a couple of options with regard to how you deliver Citrix applications.

The most common model is a full desktop on a thin client (either a dedicated thin client device or a crippled PC). Running all your applications within the context of a single desktop is fine, but if you've got a couple of desktops, eg on a laptop things can get confused and confusing as you've found. The advantage of a full desktop is that there are quite a few things (local drive mapping, shared clipboard etc) that can be disabled to improve remote performance.

The second delivery model is to use seamless application publishing. That means that remote applications are available seamlessly on for example a laptop desktop and they look like they're running locally. Using seamless applications is a whole lot less confusing for end users. Because you need to be able to integrate local and remote applications you can take a significant performance hit. For example if you press the screen print key, this causes several MB of data to be synchronised back to the remote session which on an ADSL link can really slow hings down.

However regardless of the delivery model, latency and network bandwidth as well as Citrix server performance will determine how well the remote applications perform. If server tuning is bad, and out of the box "tuning" can be really suboptimal, then performance sucks. If there's not enough bandwidth or you're on a high latency link then performance sucks too.

So that's the challenge. Get things right, make sure the network connections are okay and things will be fairly good or at least tolerable. Throw it together and don't bother about the quality of connectivity and the end users will hate the solution.

Find a good implementor, act on their advice, have realistic expectations and be prepared to spend some time and effort and you'll end up with a pretty good solution. Otherwise you'll have a mess.

regards,

Rick

Hi Rick,

Thanks for the concise answer.

You wrote a little about local apps and services connecting into remote apps and services, an for example the act of moving data from memory stick onto a remote share will that ever be resonable for the end user? or is it simply a bandwidth issue?

Secondly printing seems to be a big problem for users, slow printing, differnet printer drivers (windows local printer driver is different to the citrix printer drivers) and the MS office apps in particular publisher do not print to the correct parameters.

I have also heard about WAN scaler technologies being a good way to reduce the traffic flowing over the WAN links, have you had much to do with these and is the citrix product worth looking into?

Thanks

Hi Blair,

Memory sticks are supported right now, but are not seen unless they were inserted before the remote session started. There is a utility from Citrix that you run on the client and it maps the memory stick to a folder off C: drive. That let's you access any memory sticks inserted after the session has started.

However there will still be bandwidth issues. One of my customers wrote a little file transefr utility that seriously reduced the size of any jpegs being uploaded which made their camera image uploads quite tolerably fast, so even here there are things that can be done.

Printing can be an issue in the Citrix world but if the printers are client connected rather than network printers then printing, at least with presentation server 4 or later, "ought" to be reasonably efficient. The Citrix universal printer driver removes the requirement for matching printer drivers at both ends. However if you'r printing to network printers then slow printing etc will still be an issue.

A reconfiguring of how printing is done can often resolve some of the slowness issues. However if network printers are the main mode of printing then you have to consider a third part printing add-on to fix everything. We (Print-IT - Quest/Provision Networks) make a pretty good one :-)

Wanscaler type technologies will help, but the compression and optimisation provided that does such wonders for file transfer doesn't do much for the ICA client performance, yet. Once Wanscaler ICA caching is available it'll greatly improve the ICA client user experience for remote offices. May not do much for you roaming users though.

Where in Australia are you? I might be able to recommend someone who could help.

regards,

Rick

I am in Sydney.

I am very interested in getting a citrix guru to come in and take a look at our whole environment, not just the citrix implementation. Recently citrix performed an audit of our implementation, and the results can back saying that everything should be okay, but clearly there are several problems.

Thanks again for your advice.

Blair.