From the Read-Between-The-Lines Department. Okay, so I got your undivided attention by tweaking an old movie title, didn’t I? Amazing. It seems a strategic lie here and there is all it takes to get peoples attention these days and maybe also their money – I figure I’d give the attention part a try with the headline! :-) The irony is that Lies and Virtual Applications is exactly what’s at the heart of today’s article. Interested? Read more »
Tags: AntiFUD, App-V, Bullcrap, Business as usual, Clueless Marketing People, Crappsense, LMFAO, RES Software, SoftGrid, Softricity
External stuff, Fun, Reference | RESguru | 
December 15, 2011 16:58 | 
Comments (2)
While Hollywood probably aren’t adopting said title just yet, there’s definitely some Practical Magic to be shared here. A couple of months back, my old partner-in-crime, British RES Wizard Mr. Grant Tiller, created a pretty cool video. In one swift go, it shows all 
the goodness there’s to be had with the Citrix XenClient in combination with RES Workspace Manager, Automation Mananger, and the Service Orchestration Module. All in less than 11 minutes. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can still catch it here.
I’d recommend you to watch this one, as it will be well worth your time. The good folks over at Citrix did so already, and highlighted it in their announcement of the XenClient 2.1 release last week. Read more »
From the Gold-Brick-Through-Your-Window Dept. A while back you may have read about the work that was initiated at the Citrix Servtech event in Santa Clara, CA. As it turns out RES Software and Citrix Systems found a lot of common ground in leveraging the power of the RES Automation Manager to speed up Citrix XenApp 6.5 deployments.
IMPORTANT: The buildingblock has been updated Dec 5th. See below.
There is good reason to look into automating XA6.5 installations: You may not have noticed it, but the end-of-life date for XenApp 6.0 was recently updated. In other words, within the coming year you may need to start thinking about upgrading your XenApp farms. To ease this transition, it is my pleasure already now to be able to share with you the fruits of the collaboration between Citrix and RES. You can download the building block for Automation Manager at the end of this post.
A few
words about the building b
lock: It contains a Run Book which will schedule several Modules, necessary to install and configure XenApp 6.5 – including it’s prerequisites. To try it out, you need to download and install the RES Automation Manager. You can pull down a fully functional 45-day eval copy here. Getting-Started guide is available here. Out of the box there will be enough licenses to install a handful of XenApp servers. You will also need your XenApp 6.5 ISO image handy. You will either mount the image somewhere or extract the contents to a folder. Either way, the buildingblock requires the contents of the ISO to be accessible via a share. This is important. Once you schedule the Run Book, you will be prompted to enter some information such as paths, passwords, etc. See the screenshot on the right for an example.
Those of you who are savy AM hackers may wonder what’s up with the share. As it turns out, it’s really the most efficient way to access the Citrix distribution media, simply because of it’s size, it’s not feasible to upload as a AM Resource. Second, bear in mind that the ISO contents may be updated by Citrix in the future.
I wish to pers
onally thank the following people for their contributions to this project: Rick Eilenberger, Josh Fleming, Alex Danilychev and Brian Mirrotto @ Citrix Systems. And last but not least my fearless Sicilian friend Luca Lo Castro here at RES, who put the pieces together into a working building block. Credit also goes to Musa Cakar and Arno Vos, who took the time to expand the datastore capabilities. See below:
As mentioned, the buildingblock was updated December 5th 2011. The update consists of support of MS SQL Datastores. While the original buildingblock only supported SQLserver 2008, it now supports creating the XenApp Datastore on MSSQL 2005 and 2012 (Release Candidate 0).
Click here to download the updated XenApp 6.5 block: 
From the Be-There-or-Be-A-Quad-Sided-Polygon Dept! Los Angeles, December 1st. 2011. A place and time you do not want to miss this year. Citrix Systems and RES Software are getting together to throw the largest UserGroup event yet! There’s be 
presentations, exhibitions, live demo’s, geekspeaks, and a whole bunch of other interesting stuff to see and experience. RES Software is the platinum sponsor of the event, and your’s truly will be there with my cool colleagues to present, demo, answer all your RES questions and smoke cigars! :-)
Last I heard over 500 folks have already registered, so better hurry and sign up! For more information and itinerary, see Rick’s posting on the LA Citrix blog. For registration, go here.
From the Technotes-R-Us Dept. Ever wondered how to create nice uniform HTML signatures for your entire company, then to discover there’s someone that needs a different one. Fast forward 6 months you’re faced with having 5 or 6 different email signature templates for Outlook to juggle. If you want a sleek method of dealing with all that, you want to check out this article from resident co-Guru, Sascha Maier. Here you’ll learn how to not only embed different bitmaps into the signature according to group membership, but also how to distribute those bitmaps using RES Workspace Manager’s Custom Resource feature.
<<< Click here to read the article.
PS: This is our 60th article, w00t!
From the Technotes-R-Us Dept. A new article has been published in the Technote library by resident co-author Mr. Patrik Kaak. This time he takes us through how you troubleshoot if you have large User Settings files in Workspace Manager. This article illustrates how to figure out what’s actually being stored inside of these files.
<<< Click here to read the article.
Tags: .UPF2, .UPR, .UPR2, Diagnostics, Troubleshooting, UPF, User Preferences, User settings
2011, Technote, Workspace Manager | RESguru | October 28, 2011 03:23 | Comments (0)
From the RES Tech Training Dept. Are you a new or prospective RES partner in the United States? Need to get trained in a RES product? Missed the recent invite? Then keep reading, this article is for you then!
Read more »
Tags: Automation Manager, Florida, Ft. Lauderdale, RAMBC, RES Training, RWMBC, training, Workspace Manager
2011, Automation Manager, Events, Fun, RES Products, Training, Workspace Manager | RESguru | 01:06 | Comments (0)
From the Interesting Tidbits Dept. Here’s probably the shortest RESguru posting to date, but it’s been a little thing that has been itching to be posted for a while. In all it’s simplicity it’s about how you would reference an empty string in either Automation Manager or Workspace 
Manager. Since there isn’t a NULL operator per say, we have to rely on our old friend, Mr. PatternMatching. In other words for the uninitiated, RES products supports a pletora of wildcard operators within the text input fields of the products. You can also use variables and functions here. Also check out the RESpedia entry on patternmaching.
The use-cases are many, as you might need to check on environment variables, registry settings, AD properties, file versions or something completely different. Here is a 
quite simple one: Let’s say we want to check if a variable is set or not. All we have to do is use the pattern “?*” without the quotation marks. The questionmark determines that a single any-character must be present, and the asterisk says that any number of characters including none, may follow. Here on the right is a screenshot which illustrates the usage. PS: Thanks to Dave Bryant for sharing this nugget.
From the Why-do-I-even-bother-with-these-fools Dept. Since the beginning of the week, several partners emailed me to ask if I’d seen a posting by some marketing dude over at the usual suspects. Lately they’ve been vying so hard for my attention, that it 
would be a shame not to humor our regular readers with a proper rebuttal – especially when one can pull the pants of said stuffed marketing suit in one swift article. Gareth, I don’t know who you are mate, and I frankly couldn’t care less. But you gave me a total Jon Stewart Moment when I read your article. So, sit back, take a deep breath and enjoy…
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