Koetzing IT
Thomas Kötzing - Freiberufler, Analyst - MVP, CTP
Slow logons are already an issue but when it gets to a certain duration then it causes massive problems when using only publish application. Things can get even worse when Citrix user profile manager automatic configuration has not been disabled. Automatic configuration of UPM enforces profile streaming and it might and can cause further issues when dealing with a lot of small files like ini files, cookies, bookmarks and others.
Microsoft has changed or extended the screen saver capabilities and in addition Citrix has disabled the screen saver and power functionallity by default for all Windows client operating systems. Therefore, you might find yourself unable to activate the screen saver as you have done before.
Using group policy is getting more common instead of long and complicated login scripts. I often eliminate customer's login scripts into group policy and has many advantages. Nevertheless, group policy can slow down login time for different reasons. I recently showed a customer a simple way to troubleshoot login delays caused by group policy.
Citrix XenDesktop Desktop icons are by default the same pictures for all delivery groups and quite boring. Back in the old XenApp days, the icon for Desktops could simply be picked during publishing. With XenDesktop, you have to use PowerShell (welcome to the future!) and with version 7.13 the get-ctxicons (Retrieves icon data from various sources) was removed and makes the process more difficult.
The interactive session is probably the most time spent during logon, according to Citrix Director. What is, actually, the interactive session and how can it be reduced? For many customers and users the logon duration is important and, therefore, you might want to minimize the time. This is nothing new and I have written and talked about the Windows logon a lot in the past because it's an important topic, once you steal the user's PC and replace it with a Thin Client.
Citrix released XenDesktop/XenApp 7.12 and with it some features that have been around for a very long time in the IMA architecture, that is up to XenApp 6.5. If you have worked long enough with XenApp 6.5 or before, you might be thrilled to know those features are back, or at least something close to it.
Here are some things (not all) that I picked from the release that I found worth mentioning.
With Internet Explorer 11 Microsoft extended their Protected Mode feature with an Enhanced Protected Mode option that can be enabled in the enhanced Internet Explorer settings. By default, the Enhanced Protected Mode option is NOT active. If the Enhanced Protected Mode is active, then Internet Explorer will crash when Adobe Flash is loaded and plays a video. This issue is widely reported from people surfing YouTube.
