By Shawn Bass on Thursday, March 27, 2008 7:13:00 AM

It's no secret that Citrix is planning on moving large parts of the Citrix farm configuration into Group Policy.  One of the many reasons for doing this is that you could build a new server, drop it into an OU, and have it preconfigured for use.  While this group policy based farm configuration won't be coming for a year or two, there's some important things that Juliano has discussed in a blog entry with respect to how you get from IMA-based farm/server config to Group Policy based farm/server config.

Essentially what Citrix is planning on doing is creating a Migration Utility that would read the farm information from your current PS 4.5 environment, export the entire thing to an XML file (which you could then edit to make minor modifications and then import it into the new XenApp environment that is Group Policy based.  While I applaud Citrix's thoughts in this manner, I also feel like this type of utility is about 7 years overdue. If a farm migration ... Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, March 18, 2008 2:57:09 PM

I just noticed on Frameworkx.com that Gus and Rich have officially joined Citrix Systems as Technology Evangelists.  This isn't entirely surprising as both of them worked for Citrix in previous lives, but what is interesting is the timing.  Citrix has recently lost several of their Citrix Technology Professional (CTP) members.  One wonders if this isn't some tit for tat with Provision/Quest...  Of course with Gus gone, there goes another CTP.  Don't worry Gus, I'll hold down the fort for ya!

See this blog entry on Frameworkx for the details.

I know both Gus and Rich very well and I wish both of them the best of luck with Citrix.

By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, March 04, 2008 3:43:38 PM

I'm at a client side right now working on a large SoftGrid implementation project. I'm going through the motions sequencing applications when I came across one application from Reuters named StockVal. While I initially figured that this would be a slam dunk sequencing process, I discovered that it was anything but that. You see it's become apparent to me that application virtualization doesn't actually save you from your own stupidity. What do I mean by this? I mean that one of the biggest challenges with traditional software packaging is that packagers do stupid things. What kind of stupid things?  Well here's some that I've personally solved over the last year:

1) Packager snapshots MDAC 2.5 RTM version registry key (the Data Access version key) and distributes said package to over 3,000 desktops. Those desktops that attempt to install anything that requires MDAC 2.7+ fail as they are stating that the machine needs MDAC 2.7. Well XP doesn't come with MDAC ... Read More »