Figured I’d keep with the theme of my last blog and make this another little how to. Most people who have Citrix XenApp and App-V in their environment would be aware of the Citrix App-V Integration kit which leverages a Conduit file to publish App-V sequenced applications through the Citrix Receiver. That’s pretty well detailed on the Citrix site:
https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX126082
There’s also a very easy way to publish your App-V applications via the XenApp Web Interface. Why would you want to do this? Well maybe you have home users that are on Thin Client machines and only access through the XenApp Web Environment. Rather than publish a desktop with all your applications you may want to make some applications available via the Web UI. To do this your requirements will be:
Citrix XenApp Infrastructure (Delivery Controller(s),Web Interface servers, Provisioning Services or whatever configuration is used in your environment)
App-V Client for Terminal Server (RDS)
Citrix XenApp Session Host
A Sequenced App-V application
So you will be required to setup the App-V Client on your Terminal Server first. This means getting your hands on the TS version of App-V. Note that the client with the MDOP DVD is not the one you need to do this, you will have to get on the iso file from the Microsoft site. Once you have the Client it’s as simple as setting it up to meet your own requirements. If you do not know how to do this I suggest getting familiar with the Client as it’s the main component for App-V. I would suggest checking out Tim Mangan from my Blogroll on the right side of the screen. He wrote a great book all about the client. Once you have the Client up and running you should import your application into the App-V Management Console and stream it to the Terminal Server( Go on the TS and refresh the publishing server). For more information on importing your application into the Management console for streaming see mpreviousos blog post: Here
Once you’ve verified the application works on the server you are ready to publish to the XenApp Web Interface. This is pretty simple, go to your Citrix Management Console. Browse to your server of choice.
Under your applications, right click and select Add New Application. You will go through the same old Publishing Application wizard with a couple of key differences to be aware of. You will not be browsing to your application under the Install Directory like you would for a regular application. What you will need to do is browse to the server you streamed your application to and then select the sfttray.exe under C:\Program Files\Microsoft Application Virtualization Client. You will then need to pass a few arguments/parameters to launch the application you want e.g. /hide /launch “Application” [%*]
/hide /launch launches the application with hiding the loading
“Application” will be whatever appears in your NAME tag within your applications OSD file
[%*] passes the WorkingDir from your applications OSD. Note if your OSD doesn’t have a WorkingDir populated you should not put this in or your application will fail to launch.
You can set your shortcuts icon to whatever folder you prefer and use whatever icon you’d like. I just pick the icon which is located with my APP-V application in the icons folder
You will also need to assign the application to an AD group, this may or may not be the same AD Group you used when assigning the APP-V application to the users. If it is not the same you should remember that you need to assign the application to the correct groups. If you assign the application through Citrix Management Console but not through the APP-V Management console the application will fail to launch. You should also be aware that when you are selecting what servers to allow the application run on, you should ensure whatever servers you pick have the APP-V Client installed and have had the application streamed to that server before publishing the app via the Citrix Management Console.
