Monday 8 November 2010

Citrix Online and Offline plug-ins updated

Citrix have been quietly updating things again over the last couple of months – this mainly appears to be an exercise in bug fixing from the original XenApp 6 release!

Citrix Online Plug-in 12.1

I still call it the “Citrix Agent” y’know.

Anyway, v12.1 has finally been released and can be downloaded from here:

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX126965

It boasts a staggering 72 fixes to the previous versions which has got to make it an important release.  The most important fix from my point of view is the end of the bug introduced in at least v11.2 which caused clipping to occur when shadowing users on apparently any version of Citrix farm.  Previously I have been downgrading helpdesk users to v11.0 which usually fixed it, it is nice to have that problem removed.

New features of the client include

  • ICA file signing. Apparently our security is increased by this change.
  • The client end of the new XenApp Printing Optimization Pack.  There is a corresponding update for the XenApp 6 servers as well – this should improve printing for clients using v12.1 connecting to servers with the hotfix XA600W2K8R2X64010 installed.  Personally I am about to start testing to determine whether its worth updating ALL our servers and clients to get this or just let it creep in.
  • A new decoder for HDX 3D Pro Graphics, which apparently is something for XenDesktop - this explains why I have never heard of it before.

I think the 72 bug fixes are probably the big win here!

Citrix Offline Plug-in 6.0.1

And I still call this the “Streaming Client”…

Whatever it is called, it was updated last month and can be downloaded from here: http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX125480

The good news for those with lots of application streams is that there is no new Streaming Profiler, version 6.0 is still current, so we should not have to recreate or update everything.  Again.

Anyway, for an upgrade of one minor point version – 6.0.0 to 6.0.1 – it has a LOT of stuff in the Issues Fixed list – 45 at the moment, and I am sure this has gone up as well since they released it.  Worrying issues this release fixes include scenarios where the XenApp servers could experience a blue screen of death crash (nice!) and a really annoying bug in streaming Microsoft Office where fonts fail to load.  I’m fairly sure I spent some time trying to fix this before it became one of the many reasons I wrote off streaming Office 2010 to servers in this release and went Hosted instead.

There is still stuff in the Known Issues for the Offline plug-in, including incompatibility with UPM v3.1.0.86 (just upgrade to 3.2…) and an odd couple of issues if you uninstall the client, the fix for one of them being to run a Repair on XenApp itself. 

So anyway, both client upgrades look like being a really good idea, fixing a phenomenal 117 issues between them.

0 comments:

Post a Comment