RES Software and Microsoft Visio shapes

A daily job for me is to implement and design RES Workspace Manager or Automation Manager environments. When it becomes to the documentation or the design of these environments, I love to use Microsoft Visio to give a graphical overview of the new environment. RES Software has released some nice shapes for Microsoft Visio of the RES products!! How cool is that…and so usefull for those people who love this great products!

The downloads are available on the RES Software download page. See also the URL’s below.

Microsoft Visio Stencil – RES Workspace Manager 2012
Microsoft Visio Stencil – RES Automation Manager 2012 
Microsoft Visio Stencil – RES Service Orchestration
Microsoft Visio Stencil – RES HyperDrive

 

How to: Remove the Citrix Receiver tray icon

With the new Citrix Receiver version there’s always an tray icon vissible. When you want to disable this tray icon, you can following this steps.

1.) Create a new Registry Item
2.) Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Citrix\Receiver
3.) Create a new REG_DWORD with the value 0 (zero)

Login to your desktop/laptop again and you’ll see that the Citrix Receiver tray icon is gone! 😉

   

 

RES PowerFuse 2008 SR7 released

This service release contains support for Microsoft Windows 7 and support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2. SR7 also contains over 50 additional enhancements and improvements. Service Release 7 can be obtained through the RES Software Portal. 

Some Enhancements:

• Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 support.
• Building Blocks: import improvements
• Error Log: RES PowerFuse no longer depends on CAPICOM
• Home Directory Maintenance: provide a custom list of printers in PowerPrint
• Instant File Associations: automatic import of file types when adding applications
• Registry: disable removal of run keys
• Registry: fix Microsoft Windows Desktop Search
• Registry: force disconnect of RES PowerFuse session after a certain amount of time
• RES PowerFuse Agents: improved performance of Agent cache when processing changed objects
• Security Management: improved performance when checking logged security events
• Startup: improved performance when starting RES PowerFuse sessions using the Microsoft Windows shell

How to: Publish mandatory profiles in your RES PowerFuse environment

When you set up a RES environment, you also want to give the users there profiles. Which type of profiles, that depands on your environment, but in this example I’ll use Mandatory profiles. This means the same profile for all the users and savind the custom settings per user by using User Preferences within RES PowerFuse. I very nice solutions with the best performance.

The first step is to create a fresh Mandatory Profile.

1.) Create a new local user on a Windows 2003 Server machine and make that user member of the Local Administrators Group.
2.) Login with that that user.
3.) Make your changes.
4.) Right-click on your computer, Properties, Advanced, Settings (unther User Profiles).
5.) Select your template user and click Copy To
6.) Browse to your share on your server.
7.) Change Permitted to use to Everyone Full Controll.
8.) The last step is to rename your NTUSER.dat to NTUSER.man, this makes your profile Mandatory (Read-Only).

01    02    03

Now we’re going to publish this mandatory profile to all the RES PowerFuse Agents, so the Mandatory profile is present on each PC with the RES PowerFuse Agent.

1.) Open your RES PowerFuse Management Console.
2.) Click on RES PowerFuse Setup, Datastore, Custom Resources
3.) Click on Add, browse to your Mandatory Profile share

As you can see, there’s now your Mandatory Profile. It will be published to all the RES PowerFuse Agents. The default location is: C:\Program Files\RES PowerFuse\Data\DBCache\Resources\custom-resources

04    05    06

07    08    09

The last step is to edit the profile path from your Active Directory Users.

1.) Open Active Directory Users and Computers on your Domain Controller.
2.) Locate your users
3.) Select one or more users and click Properties
4.) Go to the Terminal Services Profile tab
5.) Type in the path to the local Mandatory Profile
C:\Program Files\RES PowerFuse\Data\DBCache\Resources\custom_resources\Mandatory-2003

10    11

Now the users are ready to login on your Terminal Server environment with RES PowerFuse. 😀

RES Workspace Extender…

Today i’ve installed a Terminal Server 2003 Environment with RES Powerfuse 2008. Some applications are not compatible for your Terminal Server environment, so there’s a nice solution for this applications, RES Workspace Extender.

RES Workspace Extender is a very usefull feature to enable applications not suitable for Server Based Computing (SBC) environments to integrate seamlessly into these environments anyway. You may already be familiar with the concept of Seamless Windows. This was an idea developed by Citrix back in the Metaframe days, to enable the client to spoof an remotely published app, running off a citrix box, to look like it was integrated into the local desktop. What the RES Workspace Extender does, is quite the opposite, hence the reverse reference: It makes a local application look like it’s part of a remote desktop, hence effectively turning a PC into a thin client with fat-client capabilities.

So let’s see the screenshots, so you can see the tool running in a live environment.

trm_01    trm_02    trm_031

In my case the name of the terminal server is SRV-TRM01. As you can see, the application Winrar(for example, you can also use Windows Media Player or a CD/DVD burning application) is not installed on the terminal server. So let’s publish this application with RES Powerfuse using the tool RES Workspace Extender. I’ve installed a workstation called WS-XP01. I’ve installed the RES Workspace Extender and Winrar. You can see the RES Workspace Extender running in the system tray of the workstation.

The next step is to open the RES Powerfuse Management Console. Add a new application.

app_01    app_02    app_03

app_04    app_05    app_06

app_07    app_08    app_12

Make sure you enable the option Run as Workspace Extension (Yellow text). So let’s logon to the Terminal Server and as you can see there is our published application Winrar. When you start the application, and you take a look at the Windows Task Manager on the Terminal Server, you can see that there’s no proccess called winrar.exe, exactly that’s because the application is running local on your workstation!

app_09    app_10    app_11

The same for example Windows Media Player. As you can see, there’s no proccess called wmplayer.exe.

app_13    app_14    app_15

app_16    app_17    app_18

You can also see the difference between running Windows Media Player local or on the Terminal Server…so what is your choice?? 😀