Friday, November 07, 2008

My upgrade of Citrix Presentation Server Web Interface 4.5 to Xenapp Web Interface 5.01

Hi All,
Just wanted to pass along my experience today of upgrading our external Citrix web interface from Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 to XenApp 5.01.

For the most part I was pleasantly suprised with the ease of it and how well it went. I am still figuring out some of the new file structures and customizations but I will pass those tidbits along as I figure them out.
I started by downloading the Citrix Xenapp 5.01 Web interface file from Mycitrix.com which is buried under Xenapp 5 server on the Citrix Site. You will need a mycitrix.com login in order to download the free Web Interface 5.01 file. You can try this link after you login:
http://www.citrix.com/English/SS/downloads/details.asp?downloadID=1681219&productID=-1
I then made a backup copy of my program files\citrix folder and my Inetpub\www folder just in case things went terribly wrong.

Needless to say the documentation for 5.1 was rather lacking. There was a paragraph in the XA 5 admin guide saying you could upgrade from 4.5 to 5 but good luck finding anything else out there. So I gave it a whirl, I closed all apps on the server stopped the antivirus and my WI website in IIS and ran the WI 5.01 executable. It immediately crapped out because it did not find the Xenapp 5.01 console installed on the server. So I had to go back out to MyCitrix and find the Web Interface Console installation files.

After some searching I finally pegged them down. I downloaded and had to unzip them to run the executable. It was called the Web Interface 5.01 Console Extension on the web site. I found it at
http://www.citrix.com/English/SS/downloads/details.asp?downloadId=1681221&productId=186

I ran the Console installation, nexted through it with defaults and all seemed well.

Next I ran the WI installation executable. I chose defaults on all that and nexted through the prompts. Went back to IIS restarted my website and restarted my antivirus and jumped on another machine to see how it looked. Well WI came up and it is a simple black login screen. So I ran the WI console and went through the choices, played around a little bit and made some modifications. This version of WI doesn't use the include files in the same way as 4.5 and has a little bit different directory structure but the new version of the console setup for the website does allow for some additional configurations of color and html links in it. This weekend I will poke around the Web Interface 5.01 SDK that was recently released on the Citrix Site to see what I need to do to get my headers and footers back and pretty it up, but the site is running just fine.

It was an easy upgrade, no problems except for the console surprise. WI 5 seems to load the apps faster and I tested it out on my Tmobile dash to see if it detects the mobile version and it indeed does. Now I just got to get the ICA client working on my dash and I can have my office with me in my pocket wherever I go!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

did the link changed after an upgrade from /Citrix/AccessPlatform to /Citrix/XenApp