Cradle on Citrix

Cradle-5.2 has been fully integrated with Citrix Presentation Server © version 3 and later. This allows Cradle clients to be installed on a Citrix server (or server farm) and then used remotely from any PC that can connect to the Citrix server(s) without any part of Cradle being installed on the user’s local PC. This is made possible by the Citrix ICA protocol that very efficiently redirects the Cradle clients’ User Interface (UI) from the Citrix server to the user’s local machine, and which redirects the user’s local keyboard and mouse operations back to the Cradle client running on the Citrix server.

Since Microsoft Terminal Services © is implemented using Citrix, this support also extends to Terminal Services.

Some organisations use these technologies to avoid the expense and time involved in performing local installations of applications on end user PCs. Instead of such local installations, applications are installed on a Citrix server and published. The act of publishing an application means that some or all of the users allowed to link to the Citrix server have the ability to launch the application so that it runs on the (remote to them) Citrix server but is displayed on their local PC.

Citrix administrators can choose to either publish whole desktops or just individual applications. Cradle supports both approaches and allows all of the Cradle clients to be published in this way:

• Toolset
• WorkBench
• Menu
• Document Publisher
• SpellChecker

Users wishing to deploy Cradle in this way should note:

• When installing Cradle on the Citrix server, install the Cygwin X server and not the XVision X server from the Cradle software distribution
• Microsoft Word must be a published application for Document Publisher to work as a published application
• Microsoft Word and/or Excel must be published applications for the corresponding Cradle plug-ins to be available as published applications

Some organisations are using thin clients to reduce or eliminate the support costs associated with providing end users with their own PC. Typical of such thin client devices are Eon © machines from Neoware ©, there are many others.

With its enhanced support for Citrix ICA protocol, Cradle-5.2 can be very easily deployed onto any such thin client devices.