Improve The Citrix End User Experience

Improve The Citrx Experience:

If your goals is to improve the Citrix end user experience, and maximize, and I emphasize MAXIMIZE the total user experience, there are serveral key things that can be done to accomplish this.

1. For low bandwidth connections, such as dial-in, Reduce the client PC color depth to 256. This alone will dramatically improve client performance.

2. Use local profiles. Besides improving performance during and after logon, there are less items to customize and engineer to make local profiles work and more to custom engineer when using roaming profiles. The purpose of profiles is to save custom application settings that each user sets up, like tool bars, page settings, file save and file open locations, favorites etc... All these settings follow the user when using roaming profiles. Which is good, sort of. What I am suggesting here is to standardize on application settings and not offer the end user the option to customize the environment. You can still provide a very acceptable and usable environment by standardizing and pre-engineering all the settings a customer will need, while using local profiles. Look what you gain, faster performance, Standard application settings, ease of support. I know what your thinking, Outlook profiles!, well even this can be scripted to create a new Outlook profile each time the person logs on to the MetaFrame Server. And it's fast. Creating the Outlook profile each time the person logs into the MetaFrame Server opens the opportunity to apply changes to settings in the PRF file when needed, and have them take effect the next time anyone logs on. To create Outlook profiles each time a user logs in, use the Exchange Resource Kit tools profgen.exe and newprof.exe.

In summary, if you engineer the environment correctly using local profiles, you can then delete any profile anytime and be confident that when the person logs back in, they will have the same efficient working environment.

3. Do not map client drives. Business data is at risk when data is stored on PC hard drives that are not backed up. Data should alway be stored on file servers that are backed up. If you must map client drives, turn off "connect client drives at logon" and place logic in the logon script to map only the client drive required. Something like

ifmember "domain\Global group ABC"
net use m: \\client\d$

or

If InGroup("Domain\Global Group ABC")
use m: "\\client\d$"

4. By default, connect only to client's main printer.

5. Disable Client Audio Mapping, and COM Port Mapping.

6. Optimize Logon scripts for better perfomance.

7. For published desktop environments, make sure to set Internet Explorer advanced setting "Empty Temporary Internet files folder when browser is closed".