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Setting A Minimum ICA Client Requirement

Tuesday, 21 August 2007 by Michel Roth

I just ran into this really cool Citrix support article. I know that sounds very sad but just here me out. The article is about how you can, relatively simple, set a minimum client version requirement for users connecting trough the web interface.

Every new version of Citrix adds wonderful capabilities such as Session Reliability in Presentation Server 4.0 or the new SpeedScreen Progressive Display in Presentation Server 4.5. The problem is however that you almost always (at the very least) need to have the client version that was shipped with that particular version of Presentation Server. Now this might not seem like such of an issue when you have full control over the machines running the ICA clients (for example in LAN environments).

However, when you do not have (much) control over the ICA client versions (such as clients connecting from home or other places) it would be nice to set a minimum ICA client requirement. Sure, the Access Suite console allows you to offer the most recent client for download but it does not enforce it! CTX113879 tells you how you indeed can enforce a minimum ICA client version. This however only applies to the Citrix Web Interface 4.5 but that is fine because a lot of these "foreign" ICA connections use Web Interface anyway. It's simply about editing the Web Interface site with the minimum build number you want to allow and adding a site where users get redirected to when they do not meet that minimum requirement. There you could of course host the most recent ICA Client for download.

Cool huh? It's like having free advanced access control albeit a VERY stripped down version ;-)