About this Course

In this course students will learn how to optimize an environment to deliver a great user experience. Starting with the user device and Citrix Receiver, the course covers advanced deployment and configuration options to optimize the delivery of their apps and desktops. Students continue with enhancing the StoreFront experience through custom branding and advanced customization options. Finally, course attendees will learn how to optimize the VDA for a better experience including faster logons, HDX graphics tuning, multimedia, and additional configurations for double hop HDX connections.

Although many options exists for deploying and configuring a XenApp and XenDesktop solution, this course focuses on the aspects of the solution that impact the user workflow and user experience. The recommended configurations taught in this course are based on real world experience of Citrix Consulting architects and consultants working with customers worldwide to streamline the user experience and optimize for complex scenarios.

Audience Profile

This course is recommended for administrators, engineers, and consultants who are interested in:

• Increasing user adoption
• Customizing user access with StoreFront
• Delivering graphics and multimedia
• Optimizing user settings for a seamless experience

At Course Completion

Upon successful completion of this course, learners are able to:

• Configure advanced customizations to StoreFront by modifying configuration files
• Configure resource filtering using keywords with StoreFront
• Configure a seamless experience for new users with Citrix Receiver
• Optimize the logon experience through Citrix Profile Manager and HDX settings
• Identify and configure the proper HDX graphics delivery method based on the user and device
• Extract HDX session information to validate graphics settings
• Configure HDX policies to ensure an interactive experience under limited bandwidth or CPU
• Optimize the experience for delivering applications over a double hop HDX connection

Prerequisites

Before taking this course, Citrix recommends that students have:

• Intermediate understanding of XenApp and/or XenDesktop 7.x
• Intermediate understanding of StoreFront 3.x (StoreFront 2.x is adequate)
• An understanding of server, desktop and application virtualization concepts
• Familiarity with Windows Server 2012 R2

Course Outline

Module 1: Understanding User Experience Issues

• Understanding common user issues
• Common misconfigurations that hinder adoption
• Understanding the user workflow

Module 2: Configuring a Seamless Receiver

• Deploying Receiver seamlessly
• Configuring Receiver through ADMX templates
• Configuring Single Sign On authentication
• Presentation of apps and desktops

Module 3: Customizing the StoreFront Experience

• Customizing StoreFront appearance and branding with StoreFront 3.0
• Using keywords with StoreFront
• Configuring resource filtering
• Advanced customizations through editing configuration files
• Porting customizations to NetScaler Gateway
• StoreFront launch and session timeouts

Module 4: Optimizing the Logon Process

• Reducing logon times with folder redirection and exclusion
• Session prelaunch
• Session lingering

Module 5: Optimizing HDX Graphics

• Understanding graphics delivery
• Configuring the graphics modes with policies and templates
• Selecting appropriate templates by use case
• Extracting graphics HDX information for troubleshooting
• Reducing bandwidth through policies and settings

Module 6: Delivering Multimedia

• HDX Redirection technologies
• Client and server content fetching and rendering
• Configuring Flash video fallback behavior
• Configuring Windows media redirection and transcoding
• Using the HDX Skype for Business optimization pack

Module 7: Configuring for Double Hop HDX Connections

• The double hop HDX scenario or ICA-pass-through
• Drive mapping with double hop
• Workspace control behavior
• Session sharing behavior