Gabe Knuth - All Comments

re: XenApp 5 Feature Profile - Citrix Universal XPS Printer Driver

Gary Barton — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:13:26 GMT

Perhaps Gabe tried this with one of the early releases like the Project Delaware tech preview release. I remember we had to make a change kind of late in the relase cycle that removed the pre-vista support from the INF in order to get through MSFT certifcation.

We designed the driver to work on both platforms with .Net 3.0 SP1 or higher... but as Rich pointed out in an earlier post, the driver may work for you but is not offcially supported or fully tested on 2k3 platform (yet).

The main benefit to XPS is the smaller print job size compared to EMF. This will be most noticeable for customers trying to print over bandwidth contrained WAN connections.

XPS also opens up some other options for us in the future regarding more agressive optimizations and a few other goodies.

-Gary Barton

Citrix Product Development

re: XenApp 5 Feature Profile - Citrix Universal XPS Printer Driver

Bartosz Tyrakowski — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 09:09:27 GMT

Hallo Gabe,

This is an interesting article, thanks for that. But you are not mentioning any limits of this feature or benefit either. Have you or anyone else figured out any issues that have to be named? Are there any kinds of prints that will not work with XPS printing?

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re: XenApp 5 Feature Profile - Citrix Universal XPS Printer Driver

Rich Brumpton — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 00:43:49 GMT

XPS printing is a 2008 only feature IIRC. It might be possible to hack it on 2003, but it would not be supported.

re: XenApp 5 Feature Profile - Citrix Universal XPS Printer Driver

Gabe Knuth — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 17:05:28 GMT

My lab is all 2008 at the moment, so I wasn't able to test the 2003 installation stuff. It is referenced in the XenApp admin guide, though. I'll lab it up in the next day or two and get back to you.

re: Ericom's True Media Experience, or Reverse Seamless Windows

Patrick Rouse — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 03:57:02 GMT

I honestly don't know, Perhaps Michel is working with specific customers that asked for this feature and it's being developed.

If it works for non-Windows clients it definitely has value.

re: Ericom's True Media Experience, or Reverse Seamless Windows

Dan Shappir — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 12:38:04 GMT

Patrick,

This feature will be available for Linux and Mac clients as well as for Windows. Also, while reverse seamless can address many of the same scenarios as multimedia redirection it can address other scenarios as well. For example it can be used with Voice over IP clients.

From your comment I understand that contrary to what Michel Roth wrote Quest is not developing this feature.

re: Ericom's True Media Experience, or Reverse Seamless Windows

Patrick Rouse — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 05:48:03 GMT

I'm with Ewen.

What I'm seeing is that IT wants the simplest non-Windows OS at the client, connected to a virtual desktop, so they're only managing one instance of Windows per user. I think this freverse-seamless eature is really "cool", but I'm not entirely sure of the business use case unless it works for Linux clients as well as Windows.

Since we already have multimedia redirection for Windows & Linux clients, I'm not sure exactly where this fits, but am open to the possibilities. Once again, cool stuff, and the more deployment options the better.

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re: XenApp 5 Feature Profile - Citrix Universal XPS Printer Driver

dbales — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 01:47:14 GMT

I have the same problem as Brandon, It only lists the regular Citrix Universal Printer. I looked in the .inf file and it only has "Citrix XPS Universal Printer" listed for Vista and 2008.

re: Ericom's True Media Experience, or Reverse Seamless Windows

Dan Shappir — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:06:11 GMT

Hey Gabe,

Yes indeed - we use the exact same seamless and reverse seamless implementation for VDI, SBC (TS) and also Blade PCs. This means that our True MultiMedia Experience as well as regular seamless windows work with all these platforms.

re: Ericom's True Media Experience, or Reverse Seamless Windows

Gabe Knuth — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:33:12 GMT

Hey Dan, thanks for weighing in.

I know this is intended for VDI, but I think that freeing up server resources could also be very valuable for traditional SBC desktops as well. Will Reverse Seamless work when connecting to an SBC box, or is it VDI only?

re: Ericom's True Media Experience, or Reverse Seamless Windows

Dan Shappir — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:25:12 GMT

Gabe,

Thank you for the nice analysis. I'd like to take this opportunity to add a few more highlights and detail:

First, as you correctly pointed out, for Reverse Seamless to be used the appropriate application must be present on the client side. It is important to note that most end-point devices these days have a browser, and many also support Flash. As a result, at the very least, a local browser can be used instead of a remote one hosted within the virtual desktop on the server. Also, in our upcoming release we are introducing integration with Microsoft App-V for application streaming. This means that you will be able to stream applications on-demand to the client and have them seamlessly integrated into the virtual desktop.

Also, while Ericom's True MultiMedia Experience capability may not be a "be-all, end-all solution", it is a solution that will shortly be generally available for a problem that might otherwise not be solved for a long time. I wholeheartedly agree that remoting protocols need to be improved - in fact Ericom is introducing several RDP performance enhancements in the same version of our product, and they will work in conjunction with this feature. Moreover, as Ericom's Reverse Seamless mechanism is an extension of RDP, it will work with Microsoft's upcoming RDP 7 with all its performance enhancements.

It is important to note that Reverse Seamless is not just about improving the end-user experience, it's also about reducing load on the servers. Offloading processing of applications to the client can free up server resources such as memory and CPU. This enables hosting more concurrent sessions on your hardware and running more application instances. It also results in improved performance of those applications that are hosted on the server.

The reduced load provided by our True MultiMedia Experience is not only on the servers, it's also on the network. High quality remoting protocols currently being developed often consume a very large amount of bandwidth. This can make them unsuitable for WAN and even problematic on LAN. With reverse seamless the bandwidth utilization is lower than that provided by any remoting protocol because the application window is rendered completely on the client side.

We are currently working on preparing a couple of cool videos demonstrating True MultiMedia Experience. We will be uploading them to the net in the near future. I will also provide more information about this feature on my blog.

re: Ericom's True Media Experience, or Reverse Seamless Windows

Gabe Knuth — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:12:13 GMT

@Benny

I had similar thoughts about that patent, but Ericom told me that they are patenting the method and not the concept. I'm sure there's a fine line there, but it does leave an opening for others to do something similar via a different method.

Even if there is only one way to do reverse seamless windows, that might be a bonus because it will force other companies to focus development efforts on a better protocol.

re: XenApp 5 Feature Profile - Citrix Universal XPS Printer Driver

Brandon Mitchell — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:40:17 GMT

How do you install "Citrix XPS Universal Printer" on Server 2003? I've tried using CitrixUpd.inf from \XenApp Server\w2k8\Program Files\Citrix\Drivers but only driver available is "Citrix Universal Printer". .Net 3.5 is installed and there is a "Microsoft XPS Document Writer" printer available. Any ideas?