[THIN] Re: A definitive registry information source?
- From: "Joe Shonk" <joe.shonk@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 9 May 2008 09:24:31 -0700
I have to side with Rick on this one.
Speaking of custom applications, they are much worse than standard
applications to implement with Citrix. In house developers only have one
customer to be accountable for, not thousands so you'll find a lot of bad
design decisions and the caliber of talent is less than those of a
conventional ISV. I find applications that like to auto-update itself (to
keep from having to repackage and redeploy the app every two weeks) and to
make it worse, the in house developer do no seem to grasp the concepts of
change management and communication. I've seen developers use the wrong
APIs, so now the apps write to the System Root console or the App use the
wrong APIs and data is save to the local settings/application data section
of the registry. What about those fancy developer writing in Java? They
seem like to use remoting (TCP/IP) to communicate message between Java
Applets. My favorite is when the application requires administrator right to
machine. I just ran into an application that requires Power User rights to
the box and because it's a 16-bit application SUA would crash.
As far as you second point. Train or fire. Seems reasonable but it is a
very political world out there. Decisions are not always make based on
technical merit. That renegade admin may dump 50 users when the spooler is
dead but he's saved the bosses ass many times before. The boss will look
the other way and cover for employee.
TS and Citrix has gotten better over the years. Printing has improved.
Profile management has improved. Application compatibility and isolation
has improved. This still doesn't change the fact that TS\Citrix has had a
rocky history. Many of decision makers who have been burned in the past
think Citrix is an evil word. It's a hard obstacle to overcome. Even
today, we have printing issues and profile issues (I continue to ask why?).
Microsoft continues to play games. (Won't release UPHClean 2.0 because they
want to see more Win 2008 licenses).
As far as bandwidth, server specs, and budget causing Citrix a bad name?
I've never heard of these as issue causing Citrix a bad name? I have seen
the limitation of a 32 OS and an aging TS architecture let to performance
issue that raised some alarms.
Rick is right about the skill set requirements. The numbers of people who
understand and can perform the required tasks are limited. Yet the install
base is increasing. Managers have to hire what they can to keep their
operation running. I see a lot of junior admins trying to run a citrix
presentation server farm.
The same goes for AD/IIS/Exchange/SQL. I would venture to say that these
components are much easy to learn and maintain that TS/Citrix.
I'm glad that you were able to get some difficult applications to work. It
shows that you have a high skill set and deep understanding of TS and
application integration. This is the business that I am in. People come to
me to get their application to work on Citrix/TS and with today's toolset it
is much easier to do. However, there are some application that just do not
work. Camtasia and ScreenCorder to name a few. I won't even mention
Cisco... Oh wait, I did. For a software company, they should be ashamed of
themselves. If they wrote their IOS/CAT like they did their Windows apps
they'd be out business in a few months.
There are two additional things that Rick did not mention that are
important. Security and Support.
When we perform a lot of the tricks of the trade we end up trading off one
for another. It could be performance, security and/or reliability. Opening
up the file system and/or registry to get an accounting application working
may be an unacceptable risk as there may be a possibility for one user to
see another user's data. This becomes a compliance issue.
Second, even if we can get the applications to work on Citrix/TS. The ISV
may refuse to support it. ISVs have gotten better with support, but there
are still quite a few out there that will not support Citrix or TS. When
something go terribly wrong, its always good to have the vendor on your
side.
Joe
-----Original Message-----
From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of Adam Thompson
Sent: Friday, May 09, 2008 2:58 AM
To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [THIN] Re: A definitive registry information source?
2008/5/9 Rick Mack <ulrich.mack@xxxxxxxxx>:
>
> But it's still not as easy as installing an application on a Windows XP
> desktop and unfortunately the major skill set in a lot of
> organizations resides in the desktop management team.
>
That depends entirely on how you're doing it.
If it's a custom application, and you have to package it for desktop
deployment, I'd argue it's usually much harder than sticking it on a
TS.
> You know them, they're the people who reboot a TS server with 50 users
> logged on because the spooler has stopped. They often just can't or won't
> come to grips with TS and actively hate it. They're the ones that have
made
> Citrix a dirty word in a lot of organizations.
You need to fire^W train your server team if that is happening.
Nobody with a hint of a clue would do this. And nobody with a
smidgeon of cluefulness would grant them the permissions to do it in
the first place.
The ones who make Citrix a dirty word are the ones who woefully
underestimate the budget for bandwidth and server specs.
>
> It needs different skill sets, more experience and a much better
> understanding of how everything hangs together. The people who do TS well
> are the IT equivalent of rocket scientists.
>
I'm sure the people who run Active Directory would argue the same. As
would SQL gurus, and IIS specialists, and... well you get the idea.
I've had to get applications which only want to work on the console,
or would only run one instance at a time to run in a Terminal Services
environment. And I've had to get half-baked VB5 applications designed
for NT4 to run on XP SP2 desktops - without luxuries like isolation
evironments and virtualisation. I think the desktop side is harder
than the TS side.
--
AdamT
I'll ruin you... you'll never waitress in Torquay again!
- Basil Fawlty
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