Access with Citrix (1 Viewer)

[battenberg]

Hi

I am in the middle of developing a DB which will be multi user.
My boss wants to install a Citrix server over the next few weeks.
He has now asked me if we can pilot this database with the citrix server.

Can anyone advise what (if any) pit falls I may be in for as we head down this route?

Many thanks
Batt

 

[racer25]

Hi

We have Citrix installed and can be very beneficial providing managed well.

Your Access DB's would need to be on the Citrix server to get the speed gains.

The drawbacks are screen refresh times, its fairly functional but not ideal.

DO NOT use for developing your DB it will drive you insane, it lags.

I presume you are installing Citix as you have multiple offices?

Just thoughts from an End User,

Rgds

Rob

 

[boblarson]

This is a post with some good things to think about, especially about licenses, which you can't legally avoid just by using Citrix.

http://www.access-programmers.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=85644

 

[CraigDolphin]

We have citrix here. I hate it with a passion.

Access gets messed up whenever there's the slighest dang network interuption. Like your forms nice and corrupted? You'll love Citrix.

You cannot use the shell command to open other software on the local machine (only on the farm and only if you have permissions), speed of queries etc is slower due to having to send data over the network: even for unsplit db's that are locally stored on your computer, can't use the system beep to alert users of a validation error during data entry...

When citrix goes down, you'll be left unable to use MS Office unless you have a local install available. In the last year our organisation has lost about 5 days due to citrix/network failures.

Like using features like MZ-Tools? Your IT department will need to install it on the server/farm too. Hopefully your IT department is a bit more forthcoming on such matters than ours.

If you plan to use auto-repeat on a command button to incement a value in a textbox, and using Me.repaint event to display the changing values in a text box then be aware that Citrix doesn't bother showing the changes to the user (works fine in local install but not on citrix).

Some of this is down to our IT department policies but my advice is to run screaming from the room whenever the word 'Citrix' is mentioned.

 

[RuralGuy]

That sounds like one for and one against. Anyone else care to vote?

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Bob referenced a post to which I had contributed, but I'm going to chime in directly.

There are about a gazillion issues in drive mapping on CITRIX that would allow you to see files on the local machine. If you are running Access via CITRIX, remember that the files involved are on the CITRIX server, NOT your local machine. If you have to import or export something, you need permissions to dump files or grab files from the CITRIX server.

If this is a U.S. Government server, that permission will be hard to get. Even if it is a commercial site, the issues are quite complex. In general, I would NEVER use CITRIX as a cheap-ass way around issues of licensing and slow network performance. If you are going to the trouble of using CITRIX, buy a damned copy of SQL Server. You'll get better results across the board.

 

[Fifty2One]

I once was on the front end of a CITRIX setup trying to work with an external supplier who was supposed to help me from the back end to get some data sharing developed... it was NOT pretty... we were finally getting over hurdles when the contract was terminated due to the suppliers IT persons were in a labour dispute... hard to tell if the hurdles were a people thing or not but we had many horrible days... this nasty experience has given me a negative feeling when I hear CITRIX...

 

[boblarson]

We utilize Citrix heavily in the Major Healthcare company I work for. It works great for a lot of things, but it isn't a panacea. It won't necessarily work well, if at all, for some things. I, personally wouldn't even get within miles of working with Access on Citrix.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

I'll tell you right now, the ONLY reason we use CITRIX at our site is that because it can be web-based and use HTTPS plus digital certificates, it is a reasonable way for terminal users to get into our system until we can it to accept SSH connections. (Not as easy as it looks when you are trying to meet US Dept. of Defense standards, not by a long shot.)

Otherwise we would steer clear of that puppy. It bites.

 

[battenberg]

Wow!

some formidable opinions there...

I just tried the first Access DB on citrix and got a 'netmeeting' login when it starts... what's that all about???

start of things to come maybe?

 

[Simon_MT]

I personally have had no problems with running Terminal Services save to external outages and performance latency of the broadband. I have had to upgrade the ADSL line to SDSL not because the database was too slow but to handle the (15000) low res images. I understand that Citrix is supposed to provide better performance with compression but I have opened a standard Master image 50MB using Terminal Services Session without any problems.

Whatever you do you need a good internal infrastructure, reliable performance latency on the broadband and I would also suggest VPN tunnels.

Simon

 

[battenberg]

looks like we are heading down the Citrix Route.

We have already addressed the network issue with a second ADSL and a load balancing router, all clients will be VPN to start off with and hopefully move over to WEB citrix later.

Thanks for the comments...

 

[chergh]

Hmmm multi user db, access and citrix... that sounds like a recipe for much pain.

 

[Groundrush]

I tried Using Access on a Citrix server last week as a last attempt at improving our line speed over the WAN

The speed had improved but the db was annoyingly unusable as the database characteristics changed & certain bit of code did not run correctly causing the database to minimesize & lag after loading forms.

We are now going for the cheaper LAN route

 

[pbaldy]

Though it wasn't my choice, another office set up Citrix system. I have a number of Access front ends (SQL Server back end) running on it without issues. It did require a different setup to ensure users had their own individual copies of the front ends. Sounds like I'm the lucky one?

 

[battenberg]

It did require a different setup to ensure users had their own individual copies of the front ends.

would you be able to elaborate on this please???

 

[pbaldy]

I wrote a front end version control utility that put the front end in a specific folder on the C drive. That's fine for a PC environment, but caused problems in a Terminal Server/Citrix environment. While users theoretically run their own copy, in reality they don't. I modified my utility to create a subfolder based on the logged in user, so now each person truly has their own copy. The quirky issues I was having went away.

 

[battenberg]

Thanks Paul, that makes perfect sense...

 

[CraigDolphin]

*grumble* Another bug found with the Citrix/Access setup at my shop....it won't import dbf files. A locally installed copy does just fine...but the same db accessed via citrix won't work.

Don't mind me...just venting a little...

 

[Simon_MT]

If there are performance issues then try ADSL2 or SDSL as the standard UK ADSL lines only have an up speed 256Mbits whilst ADSL2 has about 750Mbit and a decent SDSL 2000Mbits.

It made a huge difference to us using SDSL.

Good luck with the Citrix, I hope it goes well.

Simon