Citrix Session & Application Timeouts, a Great Solution

I had a great day on Tuesday. An AppSense client had an issue where their remote workers experienced their Citrix applications timing out on them.

After connecting, and using application 1, by the time they go to use application number 2, it had timed out, and when they try to restart it, Web Interface had timed out as well.

So the clients question was  “How can AppSense help me?!”.

Enter “ENVIRO-MAN” from the left of screen. All dressed in pretty green and looking surprisingly like the Environment Manager Product Manager :-)

“Your session timeouts do not scare me” he roared as he landed awkwardly on the photocopier, injuring his knee.

While “ENVIRO-MAN” proceeded to bore one of the office staff with stories about the mighty Blackpool Football Club, I decided to dig in and fix the problem.

Session Timeouts are controlled by a number of parameters – as examples, there are some per server settings based on type of connection (RDP or ICA) and some user based settings set in Active Directory.

However, if you require more granularity, that’s where AppSense Environment Manager lives…

By using a Group Policy Action (Set ADM Policy / Set ADMX Policy), I was able to load in the ADM settings from the “C:\Windows\inf” directory.  I then typed “session” into the filter, and up came the Terminal Server Session Timeout setting…  Magic :-)

By using EM Rules/Conditions I could now vary the Session timeouts based on IP address, Client Name, or even by integrating it into the results of Citrix AAC filters :-)

I demoed it to the client (they were blown away), thanked ENVIRO-MAN for his help and left to help the next client in need.

All in a good days work :-)