These days, AI is omnipresent - and I've been working with it for quite some time. When I discovered an article on LinkedIn, I immediately recognized the potential for one of my clients. I adapted the approaches presented, prepared myself specifically for the customer's problem and achieved an amazing result: thanks to AI, I was able to identify the exact problem within about a minute - something that would have taken much longer without AI. In this article, I report on a real-life support case and show how AI helped me to solve a customer problem in the shortest possible time.

In 2007, I recommended Citrix to buy the User Profile Manager (UPM) from sepago. Now it's time to relaunch the Profile Manager! In modern Citrix environments, the Profile Manager is an essential tool for managing user profiles. However, increasing complexity and a multitude of configuration options have repeatedly led to misconfigurations in the past. Outdated guidelines often stood in the way and made it difficult to implement modern solutions. My advice to Citrix is therefore now to fundamentally revise the UPM and focus exclusively on profile disks! 

In this article, I present my self-developed NSKek-tool with a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI). This provides Netscaler administrators with an intuitive way to securely decrypt service passwords without having to dive deep into the technical matter. This tool combines classic cryptographic methods - HMAC, AES-CBC and the dynamic derivation of a Key Encryption Key (KEK).
In times when data security and ease of use must go hand in hand, the targeted decryption of sensitive information plays an important role. The NSKek-tool presented here offers an elegant solution: it not only enables the decryption of service passwords, but also provides a graphical interface that allows Netscaler administrators to easily select and process their key files.

As I was personally genuinely interested in the technical preview for Citrix Gateway Service for StoreFront, I registered for it. I quickly got in touch with the Citrix team on this topic and would like to thank Abhishek Singh in particular for his great cooperation. This article is intended to clarify which deployment scenarios this solution is suitable for and what else can be expected from it in the future.

Microsoft is forcing its customers to switch to the "new Teams" by mid-2024! The feedback so far is that customers are once again beta testers, and extensive tests have not even been carried out by Microsoft. There are problems with Microsoft FSLogix and the Outlook add-in. The "new Teams" on a Server 2019 or Server 2022 is yet another challenge. I have developed a Powershell scripts that installs Teams on Server 2022, Server 2019, Windows 10 and Windows 11 multiuser and also takes the Outlook add-in into account. 

The new driver for MCS, MCSIO v2, has been available since Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop version 1903. However, two important performance counters "Cache memory used" and "Cache disk used" are missing in this new version to read out current values. In addition, the performance counter path has changed from \Citrix MCS Storage Driver to \Citrix MCS(*). Unfortunately, the currently used cache disk size can no longer be determined, but only the current size of the cache disk file (mcsdif.vhdx). I have developed a Powershell script that at least gives me a quick overview of the RAM and disk cache status.