Q - Is Voyant compatible with Citrix and do you have any other clients using your software within a Citrix environment?
A - Yes, and there are numerous firms that use Voyant on Citrix.
Citrix administrators only need to ensure that their Citrix environment meets the basic requirements our software needs to run – e.g. Java must be installed and allowed communicate through their network out to our servers without blocking the download of files or scrubbing header information.
Other than the usual issues that might occur on any server or network (e.g. firewalls or permissions blocking our software from being downloaded, installed, or communicating with our servers) there is usually nothing special about running Voyant on Citrix. The server just needs to meet our basic operational requirements, as outlined here. Read more >>
Also, below are links to an installation guide and a guide to our software's operational requirements, should you or your IT department need them.
Basic Operational Requirements
Java and Voyant would need to be installed and available to each instance (virtual client) that log into on Citrix when accessing Voyant.
Required IP addresses
The IP addresses for www.planwithvoyant.co.uk are currently, at time of writing, 176.34.121.251 and 54.247.68.71.
Required content types
The content types used by Java Web Start and Voyant are
application/x-java-jnlp-file
application/java-archive
application/x-java-archive
application/x-gzip
Required file types
Files with extension
.jnlp
.jar
.pack.gz
The .jar and .pack.gz files contain binary data.
Header information
Some network firewalls alter or strip information from the headers of messages received through their networks. You will need to ensure that the headers in responses from our servers, which contain important version information, are not altered or stripped by any network proxy servers. The Java Web Start component of the JRE is looking for a specific header (x-java-jnlp-version-id) in the response from our web servers when it requests the application resources. On very rare occasions we have found that some firms operate through firewalls and/or proxy servers which remove these headers from the response.
If you would like to test this outside of the Java environment, the URL format for a versioned resource is as follows.
Below is the expected response as picked up by a network request monitoring tool (We used Fiddler with Firefox).
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 07 Jul 2011 12:44:56 GMT
x-java-jnlp-version-id: 3.2.65_sig2012
Last-Modified: Wed, 06 Jul 2011 22:08:32 GMT
content-encoding:
Content-Type: application/java-archive;charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 7489262
Set-Cookie: BALANCEID=balancer.app1; path=/; domain=planwithvoyant.co.uk
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Authorised computer limits on Citrix
The main issue that crops up when running Voyant on Citrix is our check for authorised computers – usually we allow 2 computers to be authorised per licensee. On Citrix a user may be assigned per session to one of a number of virtual clients, they may quickly run up against our authorised computer limit. What we normally do for Citrix users is ask the users to register, creating their user accounts on our website, and contact us once registered. We can then switch off the authorised computer check for those user accounts.
Additional information is available here. Read more >>
Information on another Citrix related consideration can be found here. Read more >>