Citrix environments and robotic automations

Citrix environments allow a company to simplify maintenance and reduce costs associated with configuring and delivering applications for its workers. A company’s customer service department may use several applications to manage user information and provide these applications to the end users in a Citrix environment. Doing so reduces the burden of maintenance by updating only server applications rather than every application instance on users’ desktops and helps keep compatibility issues to a minimum.

Citrix applications are delivered to users as either a published desktop or as a published application. A published desktop is an entire virtual desktop that users log in to and operate as a standard Windows experience. Published applications are applications that live and run on the Citrix server but are launched from a portal on the user’s computer.

Pega Robot Studio can automate Citrix applications. However, the specific implementation depends on the Citrix configuration. Robotic solutions for Citrix can be configured for both a published desktop or a published application. Pega refers to a configuration that contains both a published application and a local application as a mixed-mode solution.

When possible, it is best to configure a robotic solution for a published desktop. As shown in the following image, the target applications slated for automation reside solely on the Citrix server, and the development of the robotic solution is the same as solutions built for purely local applications. The user desktops are accessing the robotic solution through the Citrix client.

In a mixed-mode configuration, applications to be automated reside both on the Citrix server and the end user’s local machine. This configuration type requires a different approach than solutions built for purely local automations or published desktop configurations. Pega Robot Runtime™ must be installed on both the Citrix server and the user desktops, and the solution must be configured to allow communication between the two environments. The client machine must also have the Citrix Virtual Channel Driver installed.