Being a Citrix consultant in Denmark working for TopNordic A/S, I not only design and implement Citrix Presentation Server solutions, but I often have to take a look at implementations done by other consultants. Many times I’ve wanted to pull out the complete documentation of an installation as seen in the Management Console for Presentation Server. As far as I know there no tool for this. Yes, scripts exist for a few options out there, but there’s no complete solution. Manually documenting all the published applications and connections policies is weary work, especially since Citrix is putting more and more stuff into these.
The Citrix PS4 Documentor (or “documenter” for you Americans) is my shot at such a tool that can hopefully avoid pages of screen dumps in the future.
Okay, so what do I do?
The Documentor is easy to use. Just make sure you have the 'Citrix PS4 Documentor.exe' and the 'mfcom.dll' file in the same directory on your PS4 server. (It is important to run it from a PS 4 server itself.) Run 'Citrix PS4 Documentor.exe' and sit back! The program will create HTML files for every section in the same folder that the 'Citrix PS4 Documentor.exe' is executed from.
When documenting your published applications, a folder called 'PS4DocumentorIcons' will be created in your %systemdrive% folder. This folder holds ICO files which are used by the 'Applications Settings.html' file. If you want to transfer this HTML file to another location, remember to also copy the 'PS4DocumentorIcons' folder if you want to have the icon image retained. You may have to edit the HTML file to reflect the correct location of the icon files.
Finally, yes, you have to be logged in with a full Citrix Administrator account. No rights means no documentation! The same goes for the section about the icon folder. No rights for creating a folder on the system-drive means no documenting your published applications.
And that’s about it.
Prerequisites
The Citrix PS4 Documentor needs the Microsoft .NET Framework to be installed. Version 1.1 is preferred.
As its name implies, the Citrix PS4 Documentor only works on Presentation Server 4 servers. Non-PS4 servers are allowed in your farm, but this is not what the software was designed for so it might not work exactly right.
What if I don’t like the layout of the HTML files?
Bummer... <SMILE>
Just open the HTML file, press CTRL-A, press CTRL-C, and paste it into your favorite text or HTML editing tool and change it.
Known Issues
This tool uses MFCOM to extract the information from the Citrix farm, although some settings cannot be accessed via MFCOM, including Resource Manager and Installation Manager settings.
Either due to bugs in the Citrix SDK or my lack of programming experience, some settings generate errors and cannot be documented. (See the readme file for details.)
A Note from Author
I am no great programmer and knocked this together with a simple software editor, so if you find any bugs then please report them to me at ilja@godau.dk.
I am not responsible if you use this program and lock up half your company’s machines or domain. You use this program at your own risk!
I have tested it here on my local domain with Windows Server 2003 and Citrix Presentation Server 4 Enterprise Edition with no problems and it should work on Windows 2000 Server and Citrix Presentation Server 4 Standard and Advanced Edition, but no guarantees are given. Also it does NOT write to the datastore—it just queries it through MFCOM.
Any feedback good or bad welcome to ilja@godau.dk or feel free to share your comments below.