Aaron has a great snippet about Adobe Flash 9e breaking Citrix's SpeedFlash acceleration as the ActiveX OCX that Citrix is looking for isn't present in this version.  You probably want to give this blog entry a read before upgrading your Flash components on your servers.

Citrix is beginning a series of webinars to talk about the various SDK components.  I personally think this is very valuable as there's always a need to script some component leveraging the Citrix SDKs.  What a great way to learn about it from the Citrix developers themselves.

The first webinar in the series will on the Virtual Channel SDK and will be held on Friday January 25th 2008.  The webinar will cover the following topics:

• Brief Introduction to ICA protocol
• What is ICA virtual channel?
• Possible uses of custom virtual channels
• Virtual channel components
• Client-Server data exchange
• Introduction to Virtual Channel SDK
• Sample virtual channel demo

Click here to view the information on the webinar and to find the registration link.

Problems installing Office XP on Terminal Server while trying to suppress the installation of Outlook.  This is a confirmed bug in the Office installation routine.

What is Project S-Bend?  In it's simplest form, it's a mechanism of notifying a Citrix admin of audit related events that are occuring on your Presentation Server 4.5 farm.  Ok, so what is it really?  It's a Windows Service that Jason wrote that identifies changes to your Configuration Logging database (new in PS4.5) via a SQL Trigger.  When new events are written to the Config Logging database, Jason's windows service will dispatch an email to you letting you know what changed.  Here's a link to where you can read about S-Bend and download it.  And here's a link for basic setup instructions.  Awesome stuff.

I'm not sure how I missed this KB article in December, but Citrix released the tool to recreate the Citrix Print Service user account.  The tool can be downloaded from CTX113554.

Thanks to Thomas Koetzing for the link.

Al has a nice tip on improving the performance of RDP and ICA connections on Windows Vista.  Read the full details here.

One of the Microsoft folks in Indonesia put a new spin on the otherwise boring TS Web Access in Server 2008 by putting a Siverlight front end to it.  While it may not be practical for business people to launch their apps this way, it does look pretty!

Check out the demo here.

Download and explanation of how you can set it up here.

And thanks to Thincomputing.net for the link.

Whether your company has started it or not, companies all over the world are investigating what it would take to become more green.  What does "more green" mean?  Well, it means finding ways to reduce your companies electrical power consumption when you're not needing it.  Many companies have done simple things like ensuring that all desktop PC monitors have a Power Saver timer after 20 minutes of inactivity.  However, many organizations still leave their desktops (and servers) powered on 24x7.

Citrix is attempting to do their part by releasing their Citrix PowerSmart Management Utility.  What is PowerSmart?  In essence, it's a utility that let's an administrator control which servers in a farm are able to be powered off when their session count drops, and then power those servers up on a schedule.  More detail about PowerSmart can be found in Ray Yang's original post announcing PowerSmart.  Some organizatons may not be willing to go down this path as it's a bit risky, but sooner or later all companies...

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Ok, I'll admit it that it's not a business reason to use a software product, but it is ridiculously cool.  Derek Thorslund posted a video about a month ago that demos the features that Project Pictor brings for OpenGL acceleration.  While acceleration of Catia CAD software is really exciting stuff, it leaves a little to be desired for those folks who aren't familiar with how poorly CAD software runs on Terminal Services.  If you're in for a more true to life demonstration, then watch the end of the video when they play Quake 3 in OpenGL acceleration via Project Pictor.  That's some amazing stuff.

Thanks to Doug Brown for the heads up on the video.

There is a bug in the installation routine for PS 4.5 HRP01 that in certain server configurations will cause MSI Self Healing to be triggered on systems where HRP01 has been installed. There are very specific conditions that cause this problem and there are several workarounds/fixes.

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