Michel Stevelmans

Lately I’ve been implementing a new Citrix XenApp 6.5 environment for a large international customer.
Because the environment will be used by people from all over the world, the customer requested to have multiple language packs installed and all users should get their correct language settings, regional options and keyboards at logon according to their active directory security group memberships.
I remember from back in the days on windows 2003 this could be a nightmare, but on windows 2008 R2 with a few registry keys in AppSense and some GPO’s it’s quite easy to get this right. Continue reading »

When connected to a Windows 2008 R2 remote desktop session, you cannot change the size of the text on your screen (font size / DPI settings).
If you go to “Control Panel” – “Display” you see the message: “the display settings can’t be changed from a remote session.”.

Especially for users with large screens and large resolutions, this can be a real problem. Continue reading »

Personalizing Citrix session printers for your users will not work out of the box with AppSense Personalization.
As described in support.citrix.com/article/CTX107415, session printers are deleted at logoff and therefore AppSense Personalization will not capture the user’s default printer.

To personalize the user’s default printer with AppSense Personalization you have to apply a small workaround. Continue reading »

Although AppSense Personalization works almost “out of the box”, there are still a couple of user settings which do not persist after a log off.

I revisited my old list of registry keys and hiving actions and tested them out with AppSense Environment Manager 8.2 on a Windows 7 client machine.
The list below is an overview of the settings that did not persist. Add the registry keys you need to your session data (or desktop settings, if you have an older version of AppSense) to make the setting persist. Continue reading »

I wrote this PowerShell script to synchronize two folders with robocopy (each located on another physical hard disk) so I have a backup in case one hard disk fails.
The script will send the robocopy output log file as an attachment to the specified e-mail address. Continue reading »

With the release of AppSense environment manager 8.2, AppSense introduced the AppSense environment manager browser interface.
The environment manager browser interface lets you do the basic AppSense personalization administration tasks (for example application archive rollback and deletion of the application settings) through a web browser without having to install the full environment manager console. This allows you to delegate personalization administration to your helpdesk staff because the environment manager browser interface does not have all the advanced features the full environment manager console does.

Let’s start with setting up the AppSense environment manager browser interface. Continue reading »

My old ESXi 4.1 whitebox was nearly begging me to retire him. The maximum of 8gb memory on the Asus P5k mainboard and the 2 sata disks (no raid) spinning at 7200rpm were not keeping up anymore.

After doing the mandatory research on the whitebox HCL sites, I decided to order the following:

Continue reading »

Getting information from all installed printers on a print server can be an impossible task without third-party tooling or scripts. PowerShell can make this really easy.

I created a PowerShell script which lists all installed printers and gathers information like the printer name, driver, share name, location and the IP address (the actual IP address, not the portname without the “IP” prefix). Continue reading »

In almost all XenApp and XenDesktop environments I build, I solve user virtualization with AppSense Personalization and local profiles.
AppSense Personalization allows you to virtualize and personalize the user desktop without the need of a roaming profile, and by using  AppSense Personalization together with local profiles you get some big advantages over roaming and mandatory profiles:

• Fast logon and logoff times (no profile has to be loaded over the network)
• No profile corruption
• No manual mandatory profile creation
• No “hung” profiles

The only drawback of using local profiles is that they are not automatically deleted from the server or desktop when the user logs off, but this is where spoofing the state of the local profile with PowerShell comes in. Continue reading »