So you have finished setting up Citrix XenApps and Citrix Web Interface on your servers, now all you need to do is push the web clients to your users in your domain.

With the new version of Citrix XenApp (6.5), the web client plug-in is included in their Receiver file. You get the two versions of the Receivers from the Citrix main download site. Once you have downloaded the Receiver files, you can setup your Web Interface server to let the user download the Citrix web client through the browser. You will use the normal Receiver version (which is smaller in size) for this. Users will need to click through several steps to have the client installed on their workstation. If you do not set this up, the default link on the Web Interface points to the Citrix download site where the user have to click through the Citrix website, which can be confusing even for techies. Here’s a nice article to do this.

Another and better way is to install the Citrix Web client for the users, you can accomplish this by using GPOs (which can be downloaded from the Citrix eDoc site) or some kind of deploying softwares like SCCM.

In our environment, we do not have any deployment software like SCCM. So the options we have are left to

– Manually install the Citrix Receiver on clients workstation
– Push the software through GPO

First, we downloaded the GPOs that were provided by Citrix.

• CheckAndDeployReceiverEnterpriseStartupScript.bat
• CheckAndDeployReceiverPerMachineStartupScript.bat
• CheckAndRemoveReceiverEnterpriseStartupScript.bat
• CheckAndRemoveReceiverPerMachineStartupScript.bat

Since we want users to access their Citrix applications by just clicking on icons and shortcuts on their computer. We will need to install the enterprise version of the Citrix Receiver. The normal version doesn’t support this feature. So we setup a new OU in Active Directory with the GPO to deploy the Receiver(Enterprise version) into users computer. All was working correctly when we tested on workstations with administrator rights to the user. Users without administrator rights, the client wasn’t installed. When reviewing the installation logs, it shows the following message.

12:43:01: Information – CApp::MessageBoxW(84) – Silent Message Box (Result = 1) – You must be logged on as an administrator to perform this operation. If you need further assistance, contact your help desk.

Looks like with the Citrix Reciever Enterprise version, it needs to have administrator rights to be installed correctly.

Searching online for other options, all of them said the same things. It needs administrator rights to run the CitrixReceiverEnterprise.exe file.

The CitrixReceiverEnterprise.exe file is just a one whole file that have several MSI files inside it.

We extracted all the MSI files from the CitrixReceiverEnterprise.exe file by using the

“CitrixReceiverEnterprise.exe /extract” command

Once we have those MSI installation files, we created another batch file script and included into our GPO logon script.

msiexec /i \\server\CitrixClients\Extract\RIInstaller.msi /quiet
msiexec /i \\server\CitrixClients\Extract\ICAWebWrapper.msi /quiet
msiexec /i \\server\CitrixClients\Extract\PNAWrapper.msi /quiet
msiexec /i \\server\CitrixClients\Extract\DesktopViewer.msi /quiet
msiexec /i \\server\CitrixClients\Extract\GenericUSB.msi /quiet
msiexec /i \\server\CitrixClients\Extract\Vd3dClient.msi /quiet
msiexec /i \\server\CitrixClients\Extract\CitrixHDXMediaStreamForFlash-ClientInstall.msi /quiet

With this method, we were able to install the Receiver onto the users computer even if they don’t have administrator rights.

Issues when doing this way, is that in the user’s workstation they will see multiple installation programs on their ‘Add and Remove’ programs. And to uninstall them, you will need to remove them one by one.

Anyway, this is just a work around until Citrix fixes the issues or have a different solution.