Vishal Ganeriwala from Citrix has recently posted a blog entry about a social networking contest that's being conducted at the Citrix Synergy event next week in Houston.  If you happen to be attending, here's how the process goes:

You comment on Vishal's blog entry stating that you'd like to borrow one of the FlipVideo cameras. You record some 5 minute video segment capturing your thoughts (or someone elses if you don't have any LOL) regarding the Citrix Synergy event. You turn the camera back into Vishal the following day. All the videos get uploaded to YouTube. The top 5 most viewed submissions will receive the FlipVideo camera for free....

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Vishal Ganeriwala from Citrix sent me a tip that Dr. SDK (head Citrix MFCOM jockey) has updating his SDK Guide "Scripting MetaFrame".  The new guide can be found here and is a must read for anyone attempting to use MFCOM from VBScript/PowerShell, etc.

Gus Pinto has blogged recently about a utility developed by the internal IT organization at Citrix that was used to assist in minimizing the amount of time required to get people into their Citrix apps.  You can see a "veedio" [ LOL @Gus ;) ] of this in action here.  Gus also did a follow up interview with the creators of the utility here.

One thing to know up front about this utility is that it will be released to the web as an unsupported utility on CDN.  It won't be an "official" Citrix product.

Now before I comment on this, let me first state that I have no inside knowledge of how this thing was developed, nor am I an expert at the inner workings of it.  That being said, let me state some assumptions about how I *think* this thing is working and some potential shortcomings of it. ...

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With only three weeks to go before the Citrix Synergy event in Houston, TX Barry Flanagan has posted up a list of technical sessions from the Citrix Synergy conference.  While anything could happen, I'm getting the general feeling like this might just be the most technical Citrix iForum ever.  Even if not, I'm just happy that Citrix is actually publically recognizing the Citrix Technology Professional program as opposed to treating it like the ugly red-headed stepchild (no offense to ugly red-headed stepchildren).

View the list of technical sessions in Barry's blog entry.

I have been a long time supporter of the Citrix Online GotoAssist product as an excellent way for organizations to provide remote support to their internal associates, but specifically for their remote office workers, work from home employees, and third party customers/partners.  Whenever I'm able

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Never in a million years did I ever expect to hear a reference to Brian Madden in a public video from Mark Templeton, but that day has come.  I was reading a blog item from Jeffrey Muir where he mentioned a video that Citrix was sending throughout the company as a commercial advertisement to re-enforce the reasons why people should attend Citrix Synergy.  Jeff posted a link to the video and I gave it a listen.  Surprisingly, Mark talks about the Geek Speak Live section of the conference that several of the Citrix Technology Professionals (including myself) will be speaking at.  This is a great thing as it's becoming clear that Citrix is really beginning to recognize the CTP program and evangelize it within the organization.  If you're going to Synergy, I recommend you stop in on the Geek Speak Live sessions.  I'm sure...

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I have a customer that is performing an upgrade to Presentation Server 4.5 right now.  The way I setup their deployment is that the server is built with 2003 SP2 and then an unattended build of PS 4.5.  Then after the server is joined to the farm, there's an Installation Manager package group of about 50 core components that are pushed to the server.  From a Citrix hotfix perspective, the following items are deployed:

PSE450W2K3R01.msp  - Hotfix Rollup Pack 1

PSE450R01W2K3003.msp PSE450R01W2K3004.msp PSE450R01W2K3007.msp PSE450R01W2K3008.msp PSE450R01W2K3009.msp PSE450R01W2K3010.msp PSE450R01W2K3029.msp PSE450R01W2K3033.msp PSE450R01W2K3036.msp PSE450R01W2K3042.msp

PSE450R01W2K3032.msp -  Limited Release hotfix

These hotfixes were generally deploying well to all servers, but I've noticed an odd situation that's sometimes occurring when I push the entire package group to a brand new server.  It seems that during the deployment of PSE450R01W2K3008.msp it sometimes stalls the installation of the IM Package Group (i.e. it does ever seem to finish).  Upon further investigation of the MSI log, I'm seeing where the problem is occurring.  Here's a snippet of the MSI log with the relevant MSI action that's hanging the install:

...

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Well sort of an answer anyway...

The Technical Marketing team (isn't that a oxymoron?) from Citrix and Microsoft recently got together and published a 14 page PDF (what no XPS?) where they've compared the technical features of a Server 2003 TS, Server 2008 TS, and Citrix implementation.  While I personally think that both teams have been biased in certain areas of the document, it is a good general comparison of the features between the two products.

Click here to read the Citrix blog entry that links to the pdf.

On April 1st, 2008  Brian Madden had posted up an April Fool's day joke in the form of a blog entry describing how some new Australian firm had developed technology that would allow you to suspend a session running on a Terminal Server and take it offline in the form of VDI on a laptop.  While some people initially commented that they wanted more info about this, etc.  it became clear in the comments that people eventually realized that this technology doesn't exist. Brian later confirmed that it was truly a joke, but then questions why some of this is not possible.  What I'm going to do in this blog entry is discuss the reasons behind why this technology isn't possible. Suspend TS session and resume on a desktop VM (VDI): This one is so ridiculuous...

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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 Wizard existed back in MetaFrame XP, or 3.0, or 4.0,...

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