AppSense - Save Cookies in IE10/IE11 with WebCacheV01.dat

Hi,

after my latest Internet Explorer Upgrade on a Citrix XenApp 6.5 Farm on Windows 2008 R2 we discovered a problem with the persistence of the cookies. We need to persist the cookies for one of the applications so we are redirecting the cookies folder to a network share which worked great until our upgrade to Internet Explorer 11. The problem is that from IE 10 upwards, you have a webcachev01.dat file where some cookie settings are saved additionally under %LocalAppdata%\Microsoft\Windows\WebCache. The file is locked during the whole Citrix session by a scheduled task which runs on logon, so you couldn't copy it easily on logoff.
After some searching on the web (Thanks to: http://vthoughtsofit.blogspot.co.at/2014/04/internet-explorer-10-webcache-file.html) I have found the solution for the problem.

You have to do the following:

On Logoff:

• You have to stop the scheduled task with a custom PowerShell script
• Then mirror the folder to a network share.

On Logon:

• You have to stop the scheduled task with a custom powershell script
• Mirror the folder back from the network share.
• Start the scheduled task again with a PowerShell script.

Here is the link to the AppSense configuration file: http://1drv.ms/11FNprc


Grettings

michael.obernberger

Citrix - Receiver for Windows RT with .ICA File support released

Hello,

yesterday the newest Citrix Receiver for Windows RT (Version 1.2.0.136) was released which introduces .ICA file support on my Microsoft Surface tablet. Now I am trying to replace my work notebook with my Microsoft Surface.

Thanks to Citrix for releasing that.

Here is the download link: http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/citrix-receiver/dcbba44a-a3fd-41f4-951d-1117998c583d

Grettings

michael.obernberger

AppSense - Environment Manager 8.4 - new Features

Hi,

as I am testing right now the new DesktopNow Product (former Management Suite) I will give you a short overview of the new features in Envionment Manager 8.4

• Configuration Change Tracking:
  I have waited for this feature for a long time, now all changes are saved in a file (history.sdf) in the configuration. This feature has to be explicity enabled in your configuration on the "Change Tracking" ribbon
  
• Configuration Layering:
  Also a long awaited feature for bigger environments. So if you have different teams for your Citrix Farm or your desktops but want to have the same EM configuration now you have the chance to layer it one configuration. So you have a host configuration which is your base and then you could add different layers to this base configuration. So any team could work on this own configuration and don't see the whole configuration.
  
• Configuration Upgrade Tool:
  A textbased tool to upgrade more configuration from an older version to the latest 8.4 version.
  
• Endpoint Merging:
  Here you could more configurations on the endpoint to a new one without the need to re-rollout the whole configuration if you only change one litte thing. This has to be done with XML Manifest files and seems to be very complicated to me on the first look but I have not tested it right now so thats only a first look.
  
• SCCM 2012:
  Now you could open and save configuration from your SCCM 2012 server.
  
• MSP Patching:
  As most of the great software vendors now also AppSense switched to MSP Patching model which seems to be a great step forward in the technology which minimizes the number of reboots if you rollout a new version.
  
• Personalization Server:
  Some updates on handling deleted data and updates for the Quick Setup Wizard.

So we have waited some time for the new release but my tests are running very smooth so it seems to be a stable product with some great new features.

Grettings

michael.obernberger

AppSense Environment Manger vs. Microsoft UE-V

Hi,

I have started to test Microsoft UE-V to see what the differences/ advantages are against AppSense Environment Manager.

Prerequisites:

EM: 

For a minimum configuration and tests you need an Active Directory and a server where you install a Microsoft SQL Server Express, EM Personalization Server and the EM Console. 

UE-V: 

You need an Active Directory and a fileserver where to save your settings and your settings templates. 

Conclusion:

So as you could see here the prerequisites are nearly the same except of the SQL Server.

Installation:

EM: 

The installation of the AppSense EM is very straight forward and documented good in the admin guides and the SQL Server Express 2008 R2 is included in the installation media. 

The installation on the client side is also straight forward and all prerequisites are also on the installation media.

UE-V:

The only thing to install on the server is the MDOP 2012 Group Policy Templates to configure UE-V via the Group Policy Management Console. As I have seen right now you could also deploy the UE-V agent via commandline and set the configuration so you do not need the Group Policy templates but it is so much easier to configure it with GPOs.

On the client side the only prerequisite is .NET Framework 4 or .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. 

Conclusion:

One big advantage of EM is the broader client support as you could install it from Windows XP and above as UE-V only supports Windows 7 and above. The downside is that you need an additional component which you also have to update and maintain as this is the SQL Server which is needed.

Configuration:

EM:

The first time configuration is documented on the AppSense site and there is also a Quick setup wizard for user personalization and some common application templates (Adobe Reader, Google Chrome, Lotus Notes, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Office 2003, 2007, 2010) which are configured for you. So after the installation you could go on and start with your tests shortly without so much knowledge about the Personalization Server.

UE-V:

The only thing you have to do is to install the agent and do some configuration via GPOs which should be done in about 5-10 minutes and then you are ready to start. There are only MS application pre-configured (Calc, IE 8,9,10, Office 2010, Lync 2010, Notepad, Wordpad and some desktop settings like Themes) which could be captured to your network share.

Conclusion: So for a test environment the configuration tasks are nearly the same for both products. In my point of view the AppSense environment will be a little more complex in a production environment but also more flexible.

Architecture/Design:

The main difference you see at the architectural side is that EM is working with a SQL database at the backend and UE-V is storing its settings on a fileshare. So if your company does not have a SQL server installed and you want to work with AppSense you have to install minimum two SQL Server for failover reasons, so this could be a point where EM loses against UE-V as nearly every company on the world has a fileserver so UE-V is always possible.

There is no management/configuration console on the UE-V side so no administrative overhead on the server side but the problem with that is if you want to reset the application states with UE-V you have to "powershell" something so not very comfortable especially for the user.

As the UE-V configuration is working with GPOs which is a very robust infrastructure since a decade you likely won't see any misconfigurations or problems with that. 

The personalization itself is stored in the SQL database but with the tool "Personalization Analysis" you could read/export/import all settings for the specified user which is perfect if you need to troubleshoot. As UE-V saves all settings in the .pkgx format which isn't readable from any software I know, so it is really hard to troubleshoot the personalized settings if a user has a problem.

As AppSense saves there settings in a SQL database there is a possibility to rollback the settings of an application to a state one day/week/month before to resolve some issues. On the UE-V side the only thing you could do is to reset the application to a pristine state but not to settings which was made before.

The application settings are written back to the fileshare/SQL database on application stop so both vendors working with the same triggers here so there is no need to logoff for an application setting.

Conclusion (Differences/Advantages):

At first I am much more experienced with EM than with UE-V and I only tested it for a project to find the differences of these solutions so if any of my information are incorrect, please give me a comment and I will change it.

One thing I have seen which is better done by AppSense is the sizing of the profiles if you configure it like best practices or as the templates from the Quick setup wizard. I have made a test with Office 2010 and changed something in Word and Excel and the AppSense profile of the whole Office suite was about 300kb. I have changed exactly the same with the default UE-V templates and the whole Office settings were about 14MB great so this about 47-times bigger than the AppSense profile. If there any optimizations it is ok but this shouldn't be the case with the default configured settings. The problem with this is that you will notice the 14MB if there are copied back on a new machine to get your settings.

Another one is the not readable file format (.pkgx) which isn't very good for troubleshooting purposes if you want to see why the application for the specific user isn't working correctly. You could only reset it to a pristine state and all customizations for the user are lost.

One big plus of the EM is the variety of the clients supported. As UE-V is only supported from Windows 7/Windows 2008 R2 up, EM is supported from Windows XP/Windows 2003 up. The next thing is that EM is officially supported from AppSense on Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop and on vmware View. I have not found any official statement on the Microsoft site but I am not 100 percent sure if you will get support when you have problem with UE-V on your XenDesktop Farm.

One good thing on UE-V is the template generator which is a very easy to use application where you could find out on which registry keys and folder your application stores the configuration. I am also using this right now for my EM tests as it is much easier as the AppSense Configuration Assistant.

The Migration Mode is a big plus for EM as there is a possibility to grab the settings of an existing application so you have not to start with clean settings when you start with a user virtualization product.

At the end I want to say that UE-V is a great product for the version 1.0 and I am looking forward to see the next versions but at the state of now AppSense EM is much more advanced product. I would say that at the present time I would recommend to implement EM and not UE-V.

So if you have any improvements or if you see any wrong facts give me a comment as I have only tested UE-V but have not worked in deep with it.

Best Regards,

Michael

P.S. Please note that English is my second language. I am trying my best here, but just in case you read an odd sounding sentence every now and then, I hope you will excuse me.

AppSense - How to configure Adobe Reader language

Hi,

today we are looking at a short configuration example. I want to configure the Adobe Reader language on the startup of the process.
I have found the following article on the Adobe KB (http://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/controlling-reader-mui-startup-language.html) where they say that you have to configure the UseMUI key but this didn't worked for me so I did the second on solution which is described on the same page. Here is a screenshot of my configuration. I am working with an Else/If condition because the users where Adobe Reader should be set to English are in a seperate securtiy group so I am checking for that group and doing my configuration based on the results. They rest of the people should get Adobe Reader in German, so here is my configuration:

These are the registry keys for English language:

And here you go with the keys for the german language:

That's it, so very easy to do that.

Grettings

michael.obernberger

AppSense - How to configure an AutoCAD 2013 profile on first launch with Environment Manager

Hi,

I am currently working on a project on with AutoCAD 2013 to automatically preconfigure it on the first launch for a user. So here are the steps how to achieve that with EM.

1. On an admin workstation start up AutoCAD 2013 and configure all the things you want to have for your users on first launch.
   
2. When you are done stop the application and copy the following things to a network share:
1. %APPDATA%\Autodesk
2. %LOCALAPPDATA%\Autodesk
3. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Autodesk (-> export this key as a .reg file)
   
3. Now we are starting with the first time configuration. The first thing is that I am using an If/Else condition to check if there are already configuration settings on a network share for the user. If this is true I am copying back in this settings but if this condition is false then I am firing up the first time configuration settings which are the following.
   
4. I am creating an Process started trigger for the AutoCAD 2013 application and configuring the following settings:
   
                           
   As a short explanation: I am creating the folders under %APPDATA% und %LOCALAPPDATA% and then copying back the folders from the network share where we saved the pre-configured settings from number 2. With the registry we have to do some AppSense "magic" because there is the username of pre-configured session hard-coded into the REG-file, so I am copying the reg-file to a temporary location on the disk, then do a textfile update where I am searching for the false username and replace it with the acutal username with the variable %username% and the end I am doing a reg import to import the changed registry-file for the user.
   
5. When you have done that you are able to pre-configure your AutoCAD for all of your users on their first launch.

Grettings

michael.obernberger

AppSense - How to personalize the Windows "Libraries"

Hi,

if you need to personalize the libraries for your users it is very easy done with AppSense. The whole thing you have to do is to make a mirror folder action which copies the whole folder %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Libraries to a network location (Homedrive, Homepath, ...) on logoff and copy it back on logon.

I have attached a short template configuration for this, which could be downloaded here.

Grettings

michael.obernberger