| As mentioned, the goal of any successful implementation is to make life as easy on the end-users as possible and if that eases the administration roll in the process then what a bonus. To accomplish easing the process for upgrading the ICA clients, Citrix has created the ICA Client Update Configuration Utility that enables you to schedule the download and installation of the latest ICA Client software from MetaFrame XP servers to a wide range of ICA client devices. The ICA Client Distribution wizard places copies of ICA Clients in the database used by Client. The following sections describe how to mange ICA Clients through the ICA Client Update Configuration Utility.
With a product or feature release, Citrix also releases a Clients CD. It gives you the ability to import all the ICA clients in to the ICA client database through the Citrix ICA Client Distribution Wizard. As of the date of this publication, the ICA Client CD image is NOT up to date but still very useful. I would recommend installing all the ICA Clients from the CD and then updating newer clients separately, as documented in the following section. The latest image of all the ICA Clients can be downloaded from: http://www.citrix.com/download/bin/download.asp Note: The ICA Client Distribution wizard also installs the pass-through ICA Win32 Client on the server. The following details how to update the ICA Client database from a MetaFrame XP with Feature Release 2 Component CD. 1. Insert the MetaFrame XP with Feature Release 2 Components CD. 2. Click Start click Programs click Citrix click MetaFrameXP click ICA Client Distribution Wizard 3. Click Next 
4. Click Next to continue and copy the 6.30 clients from the CD-ROM drive. 
5. Select the Typical radio button and click Next 
5. Click Finish 
You have now successfully updated the ICA Client database with the latest clients. Now you will want to configure the ICA Clients that you will be updating and disable the rest.
When Citrix releases updates to clients that are newer than the ones located on the Components CD then you will need to download them from http://www.citrix.com/download and import them in to the ICA client database. The following details how to update the client database: 1. Download the latest ICA client from http://www.citrix.com/download/ica_clients.asp. 2. Extract the ICA Client to you local C: drive. You can use a program like WinZip to extract the .exe version of the chosen client. 3. Click Start Programs Citrix MetaFrameXP ICA Client Update Configuration 4. Click Client New 
5. Browse and select the update.ini file from the ICA client you extracted in step 2. Click Next 
6. Select the desired configurations and click Next. 
7. Click Next. 
8. Click the Enabled check box in order to enable the new ICA Client software. Click Finish 
The following details how to configure how the ICA Client Update Configuration Utility deals with client updates. 1. Right Click on the ICA Client that you want to configure and click Properties. 
2. Check or Uncheck the Update to this version checkbox in order to enable the ICA clients. Note: If you will not be supporting a particular client version then I suggest you disable it to cut down on the amount of clients that will be parsed during the logon process. This will speed up the login process. 
3. The Update Options tab gives you the ability to specify how the ICA client will be installed. Select the desired configuration and click OK. 
Now that you have added the latest ICA clients and have configured which clients are active and how they will be updated, you are ready to move the ICA Client database to a central location and configure all MetaFrame servers to pull from the central database. The following details how to configure multiple MetaFrame servers to share a central ICA client database. 1. Browse to the ICA ClientDB folder. (by default it is located on C:\Program File\Citrix\ICA\CLIENTDB\) 
2. Select all the files (Ctrl + A) and folders. Right click on a blank area of the windows and click Copy. 
3. Browse to the ICAClientDB share and right click on a blank area and click Paste. 
4. Open the ICA Client Update Configuration Utility and from the menu bar click Database click Open. 
5. In the File name test box enter the UNC path to the ICA ClientDB folder you copyied the ICA Client files to in step 3 and click to open dbconfig.ini. 
6. Click Database Click Set Default 
7. Select the Set as Default Database on Local Machine checkbox and select all MetaFrame servers and click OK. 
8. You have now copied the the ICA client database to a centrally stored location. 
With the release of MetaFrame XP with Feature Release 2, Citrix has given you the ability to enable automatic ICA Client updates on a user and or group basis. This is very useful in rolling out new ICA client versions to a selected group of users to prevent against large numbers of clients wanting to upgrade at the same time. By default, automatic ICA client updates occurs for all users. In order to enable ICA Client updates on a user by user basic I recommend to create a policy that disables ICA client updates, assign the all Citrix users to it and create another that enables client updates and assign only the users you want ICA clients updated for and set it to a higher priority than the disabled policy. The following defines how to create a Citrix policy to enable client polices on a user and or group basis. 1. Create a specific user global group to enable ICA Client updates. i.e., Enable ICA Client Updates 2. Open the Citrix Management Console, right click on Policies and click Create Policy. 3. First we are going to disable client updates for all users. Enter a name for the new policy. I recommend something like Disable ICA Client Updates. Click OK when finish. 4. Right click on the newly created policy and click Properties. 5. Click to select the Auto Client Update policy Click to select the Rule Enabled radio button in the Auto Client Update box to turn off automatic client updates. Click OK to enable the policy. 
6. Right click on the policy created in the above steps and click Assign Users. 7. Select a group the reflect all users. i.e., Domain Users, CTX Users. Click OK when finished. 8. Now we need to create a policy to enable Auto Client Updates for users and groups assigned. Right click on Policies and click Create Policy 9. Enter a name for the new policy. I recommend something like Enable ICA Client Updates. Click OK when finish 10. Right click on the newly created policy and click Properties. 11. Click to select the Auto Client Update policy Click to select the Rule Disabled radio button in the Auto Client Update box to turn on automatic client updates. Click OK to enable the policy. 
12. Right click on the policy created in the above steps and click Assign Users. 13. Select the users group you created in step 1 and click OK when finished. You have now successfully created Citrix policies to enable automatic ICA Client updates. If you would like to enable client updates for a select user and or group, all you will need to do is add their users and or group to the Enable ICA Client Updates global group. |