We have an issue with file associations that I'm hoping someone might be able to shed a little light on. My boss has made it clear that he wants us to have a few servers dedicated to IE with nothing else installed. Works fine for most things, but our internal Sharepoint sites have a number of documents on pages and each time a user tries to open one they encounter a problem. As an example they'll try to open a Word document and since Word isn't installed it will open in Wordpad instead. Is there a way around this, short of installing Office on those servers?
You mentioned "Some older clients have PNAgent" - I think you are refering to the Program Neighborhood client - they aren't the same thing.
Like the web client, the PNAgent client retrieves it's settings from a centralized web interface server. Unlike the web client (or any other client), the PNAgent can perform client to server redirection. This is the feature that you want to exploit.
If you can upgrade your entire client base to use the PNAgent client then you can enable client to server redirection and have users access the Sharepoint portal via their local web browser. If they decide to open an Office document from the portal, client to server redirection will kick in and open the document on a backend server where Office is installed. With this approach, you don't need to have dedicated "IE browser" servers as web browsing will be done from the client side instead.
The current name for the PNAgent (it keeps changing) is XenApp Plugin for Hosted Apps" and you can download it here:
XenAppHosted.msi
Alan Osborne
President (MCSE, CCNA, VCP, CCA)
VCIT Consulting - Citrix/Terminal Services Remote Desktop Solutions for SMB
VCIT website My Blog
You can change file associations per server from Windows Explorer and it will call that application appropriately from the client. However, you need the application installed on the server you are trying to associate the file to.....so, yes, in your case you would need Word installed at a minimum....not the whole Office Suite. Yes, MS Office Licensing will apply to remote users on that server if they are not Corporate MS Licenses on the clients accessing.
You can do some siloing. The idea is that users will connect to a published desktop that has the PNAgent client installed on it with pass-through authentication enabled.
When users fire up Internet Explorer within the desktop session and open a MS Word document on your SharePoint portal, the PNAgent will use client to server redirection (you must configure this first) to open a new session on a back-end server where MS Office is installed. In this case, the first XenApp server (desktop session) is the "client" and the backend server with MS Office is the "server".
Thanks Dan and Alan. We're running all VM's for our Presentation Servers so we've elected to do away with published desktops as they prove to be resource hungry. It looks as though we'll have to install the apps locally on the servers since the clients are using terminals which don't have office installed.
Another option is to publish a new IE application and append your SharePoint portal(s) URL to it:
"C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" http://portal_fqdn
Call the published app "Sharepoint portal" (or whatever) and only publish it to servers that have MS Office installed on them. Even though it's really just IE, your users will have this icon presented to them as "Sharepoint portal".
For "regular" web browsing, publish IE ("C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe") to your dedicated "web browser" servers only and name the published app "Internet Explorer".
In effect, you end up siloing "regular" web traffic since any "regular" web browsing sessions will end up on servers dedicated to web browsing only. Any Sharepoint web traffic sessions will end up on your production XenApp servers where Office is installed, since users will launch the "Sharepoint portal" icon to get there.
To prevent regular web browsing within the "Sharepoint portal" sessions, use Group Policy to assign a dummy web proxy and enter your Sharepoint portals as proxy exceptions. Link the GPO to an OU containing your backend servers but not the dedicated "web browser" servers and enable GP loopback
As long as your dedicated "web browser" XenApp servers are in a different OU, the GPO won't be applied to user sessions on those servers, so web browsing will be unrestricted.
I would be happy to consult for you on this project. Feel free to contact me via my website address link in my signature.
Thanks Alan. We actually use our Sharepoint Portal as our homepage for users so I'm not sure if this possible. My boss said that if Citrix is working properly the servers should know that they don't have the appropriate program installed and should use their local pn agent to route users to the remote servers?
Yes, that's true - if you publish a desktop on the front end server and run PNAgent within the desktop session.
Sounds messy, I like the silo idea for web browsing and resetting the silo every night. I would go for Intranet on the normal Citrix Servers and Internet on the silo, because then you are seperating user data etc.
--Emil
Hi David,
I just re-read your original post and I'm a little confused.
Do you use the PNAgent on the client side?
If so, you've got two choices (at least).
It should be easy to silo things as I suggested. Change the user's home page for "regular" web browsing to Google (or whatever - you can change the home page via GPO) and publish the new "Sharepoint Portal" app as explained previously. It wouldn't hurt to change the icon for the new "Sharepoint Portal" published app to one that people will recognize as Sharepoint to make it obvious. Users should quickly get used to using the new icon.
As another alternative, publish the Sharepoint portal as published content and use the PNAgent on the client side with client to server redirection so that attachments on the Sharepoint portal open within a Citrix session.
Alan,
Thanks again for the assistance. Some older clients have PNAgent, but for the most part users are accessing published apps through the web interface. We're not using published desktops at all in our 4.5 farm since all the servers are VM's running on ESX and we anticipated a performance hit if we used desktops. The company President wants the home page for IE to be the intranet site, which of course is our Sharepoint portal. It would be great if we could push a separate icon for it and I'll re-visit the topic with my boss, but for now we need a solution that assumes we have to keep our environment the same.
Hmm, try this one instead
Thanks for the reply. By older clients I meant clients that we deployed prior to the last 4-5 months. We are actually using the Xenapp Plugin, but during the install we're only installing the Web Plugin. In the last stages of our 4.0 deployment we were using the PNAgent client so those were the terminals I was referring to when I said older clients. The decision was made to go mostly web-client based as we were in the middle of a desktop refresh and had the opportunity to deploy the client easily. Your solution would work I think, but at the moment we have a couple hundred computers with just the web client installed. My boss has decided to install Office locally on the servers to expedite the resolution of this issue, but thanks for all the help as it does prove valuable.
Dave