I hope it is commonly known by now that EdgeSight 5.0 and 5.1 will stop working on 25th of March 2010. That’s merely two weeks away! In my opinion, the warning Citrix has published does not suffice for an issue of such effect.
Continue reading ‘How Many Will Be Affected By The EdgeSight Timebomb?’
My girlfriend is currently writing the thesis for her PhD. This involves creating several graphical representations of the results of her work. All of them are vector-based to scale to the appropriate size without loosing quality in the process. I have offered to help by inserting these graphics in Microsoft Word 2007 – a repetitious task which can be performed without insight of the content of the actual work ;-)
In the course of this article, I will outline the problem of creating high quality, scalable images and inserting them into documents using Microsoft Word. Some of the issues are caused by the inherent differences between vector-based and pixel-based images as well as the image compression in Word. Fortunately, I am able to offer a solution to these obstacles.
Continue reading ‘Microsoft Word Image Compression and the Loss of Quality’
In the course of the last six months, I have published nine articles about performance monitoring, why it is a crucial task and how the different subsystems of the operating system. To wrap up this series, this article offers an overview of the topics covered in the individual articles as well as a summary of my recommendations.
When I attended BriForum 2007 in Amsterdam, Juliano Maldaner (XenApp product architect) presented features in future versions of XenApp. He also talked about a very impressive change how XenApp handles policies: the plan was to integrate them into Microsoft group policies.
Two and a half years have passed and – finally – the project Parra tech preview offers a first (public) look at the new policy engine. In this article, I’ll have a closer look at the user interface and the handling of policies.
In a recent article, I have introduced an extension for Microsoft Office called InstantRibbonChanger. Through a configuration file, this extension is able to modify existing ribbons or add new ribbons to all applications in the suite.
With the dawn of Office 2010, one feature caught my attention: the new version of Microsoft Office (now in beta and available here) is announced to allow for ribbons customization through the user interface.
Let’s have a closer look at this feature and how it compares to the InstantRibbonChanger.
Continue reading ‘Why Office 2010 Ribbon Customization Does Not Cut It’
After several articles in this series have covered Windows server in general, I’d like to return to the topic of Windows-based terminal servers. But instead of talking about the concepts, the theory and technology of performance monitoring, this article compares two competing tools for monitoring terminal server environments: Citrix Presentation Server Resource Manager and Citrix EdgeSight.
This article is not meant to compare all available monitoring solutions as both fit in the same niche on the markets. My goal is to urge everybody to drop Resource Manager in favour of EdgeSight.
Continue reading ‘Performance Monitoring Part 9 – EdgeSight vs. Resource Manager for XenApp’
In the last post of this series about performance monitoring, I have described how to use Windows Performance Monitor to log counter values into a SQL database. Now I’ll show you that Excel is a tremendous tool to quickly analyze the collected data.
Excel offers a feature called pivot tables. It allows some data mining either on a local data set contained in an Excel sheet or on a database which Excel is connected to. Therefore, this article describes how to create a connection to the database and create nifty charts using Excel.
After a lot of theory about performance monitoring, this article demonstrates how the Windows Performance Monitor can be used to log to a database – even from multiple machines.
Most of you have probably used Performance Monitor before. It allows you to monitor performance metrics (local and remote) in real-time and to log performance data from multiple machines for later analysis. In this article, I will focus on the latter because collecting and analysing performance data from multiple machines is a time consuming task.
Continue reading ‘Performance Monitoring Part 7 – Using Performance Monitor with a Database’
My colleague Nicki Wruck (@CommunityGuide) has started a huge series of short videos about the features in Windows Server 2008 R2 – in German.
Windows Server 2008 R2 has more than 80 features available to the administrator to supplement the numerous roles. But many of these features have strange names making them close to impossible to understand.
Nicki has already published 10 videos on a YouTube channel called R2FeatureTalk. Watch me talking about Network Load Balancing – and I will be involved in several more.
Kudos for this great idea, useful content and funny introductions.
Do you host your Web Interface on one or more XenApp servers? Then I recommend you heed this article before changing your setup. You may well loose your XML service when migrating the Web Interface to another server. And loosing your XML service may result in an outage of your application delivery infrastructure!
Continue reading ‘Beware of Hosting Web Interface on XenApp Servers’
