Currently I am building a new XenApp 5.0 farm that requires both Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 servers. As a part of this process I am publishing applications and testing them as I go.
The old Presentation Server 4 environment is obviously all Windows Server 2003.
Publishing Explorer for users is not a new issue for Citrix server environments. The correct way to do this is to not publish explorer.exe at all but instead publish Internet Explorer in explorer mode.
To publish Internet Explorer 6 you simple used <path to internet explorer>\iexplore.exe h:\
That is pretty straight forward.
Then when Internet Explorer 7 came out it changes things. The explorer function was launched in a separate process. So to publish Internet Explorer 7 in explorer mode you needed to use %windir%\ie7\iexplore.exe -e h:\
Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 2003 is also the same as Internet Explorer 7, %windir%\ie8\iexplore.exe -e h:\
However Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 2008 is different. Microsoft seems to have resorted back to pre-ie7 method in the server 2008 environment.
This is a little annoying, it would have been better to keep both versions the same for Internet Explorer 8.
December 15th, 2009
As far as I can tell, using iexplore doesn’t work at all. Using XenApp 5 on Windows 2008 with IE7.
Be interested to know if you get it to work.
December 15th, 2009
Yes you are right. With Server 2008 and IE7/IE8 you need to publish explorer not IE for the explorer functionality.
“%windir%\explorer.exe”
With the working path %windir%
But it would probably work if you hard coded the path as well.
December 15th, 2009
Thanks Colin, that works! Any “gotcha’s” to using explorer that I should be aware of?
December 16th, 2009
Not that I’ve come across yet. I would just lock down access to the various other features of explorer.
Colin
May 13th, 2010
Are you able to copy and paste documents into the explorer window? I have our’s published as an installed app, but copy and paste will not work.
May 15th, 2010
Joe
You cannot copy and paste documents into a published explorer if you used the local explorer to copy. You are better of turning on local drive mappings in XenApp and then access the mapped local drive to copy and paste files.
Like all XenApp/terminal services you can copy and paste clipboard items, assuming it is still enabled.
Thanks
June 24th, 2010
Sorry its slightly off the topic but wanted to ask.
We are looking to get XenApp server to publish IE. Just wanted to ask if it supports ActiveX. We want to use MS Dynamics CRM (IE only) on Macs. Many thaks
June 25th, 2010
Andrey
Publishing IE on XenApp is quite a common thing for people to do.
Active-X is supported, but you need to keep in mind that the performance of active-X in a XenApp environment is not as good through a native Internet Explorer.
It seems that a lot of people also publish MS Dynamics CRM via Citrix.
The best way to check the performance is to test it yourself. Worst case scenario you might need to upscale your XenApp farm.
Hope this helps you and thanks for the question.