Aaron Parker has two very interesting blog entries on automating the creation of Citrix Administrator accounts using VBScript.  The first part of the article focuses on using MFCOM to read the permissions of the admin accounts as well as walking the folder structure of the management console.  The second part of the article is the complete code for adding the new admin account and setting the necessary permissions at each folder within the management console.  I recommend  checking them out if you're into automating your Citrix management tasks.

Helge Klein (from sepago) has an interesting blog entry on the bandwidth usage of ClearType font smoothing and it's impact on RDP bandwidth consumed.  I'd recommend a read of the entire article, but to summarize it appears that enabling ClearType would impose upwards of a 300% increase in bandwidth utilization.  YUCK!

Citrix announced today that they are acquiring XenSource for $500 million.  I don't personally understand such a high price for an acquisition where the existing company had less than $5 million in revenue last year.  Also, Citrix has stated that they expect this acquisition to result in $50 million in revenue for fiscal year 2008, but at an expense of $60-70 million in total cost of revenue and operating expenses.  Again, I don't get it, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed...considering I actually own shares in Citrix

There's additional commentary over at Brian Madden's site here.

Shawn

Jeff Muir has a blog entry on something that he's calling "Aggregate Computing" which is to say a merger of the client and server environment in such a way that the end user doesn't know the difference between them, but rather just has access to the resources to get their job done.  I agree with this thought process and I too think that server based computing really needs to improve the end-user seamless factor to increase the user acceptance factor.  To that end, Citrix is working on things to deal with some of these aspects, so it's certainly an exciting time to be in server-based computing.

I'm sure everyone has experienced problems searching the Citrix support site at one time or another.  Citrix has recently introduced a new search tool to search the Knowledge Center.  I personally have mixed feeling about it since it has already let me down on a few searches (though that's what a feedback form is for, eh?)  Anyway, check it out here and make sure you send them feedback so it gets improved.  I'm off to do that myself.

While I'm not entirely sure why they call it brief at just over 70 pages, Citrix has released an update to their Brief Troubleshooting Guide which is IMHO one of the best docs that's come out of Citrix (ok, aside from Jay Tomlin's WI/CSG troubleshooting guides).  It's essentially a workflow guide that can be used when trying to troubleshoot problems in a Citrix environment.  There's also links to all of the admin/troubleshooting guides as well as important KB links for well known problems.  Yesterday's update to the guide adds in information on Netscaler, WANscaler, EdgeSight, and of course Presentation Server 4.5.

Get it here:  CTX106727

Shawn

Wilco van Bragt has a nice article in a series of articles describing alternative products to Citrix Presentation Server.  It's definitely worth reading.

MSTerminalServices.org - Alternatives to Citrix Presentation Server (Part 1)

Shawn

Michael Burke has a nice article up on MSTerminalServices.org on high availability and recovery strategies for TS Licensing Servers.  Hopefully most of you are aware that in the absense of a functional TS Licensing environment, your entire Citrix environment is useless.  To that end, Michael has some great info on how you should design your TS License servers for high availability.

Read the full MSTerminalServices.org article.

Shawn

Citrix has posted information that their acquisition of ThinGenius's load testing product has been productized as Citrix EdgeSight for Load Testing and will be available beginning June 24th, 2007.  This announcement came with the official launch of EdgeSight 4.5.  Pricing for the load testing product is $7500US for 100 virtual users (approximately 1k more than previous pricing under ThinGenius).  Frankly I'm surprised this was launched as quickly as it was.  It seems Citrix is really getting this M&A thing down pat now.

Read the official press release for full details.

Shawn

From this forum thread on the official Citrix Support site, I found a link to a published KB article about the effects of WAN optimization technology on Citrix ICA traffic.  View the whitepaper from Citrix Consulting at the following link:

CTX113505 - FAQ - Truths and Myths of Presentation Server and WAN Optimization

Shawn