SECURE ACCESS CENTER DEPLOYMENTS

Of all the trends leading organizations to on-demand computing, one of the most significant is the dependency on IT staff to make everything easy to deploy and intuitive for end users. This dependency leads to the necessity of making any software deployment obvious, and void of any required end-user instructions. Thus, the largest cost savings of on-demand access is in the actual deployment of the application. Although Citrix allows a user to manually configure an ICA session, and even allows an administrator to automatically push an ICA application icon to users' desktops, the most recognized interface for users today is still a Web interface. The Web browser has become the ubiquitous access centereven the most non-savvy end user has seen a Web interface, and a significant number of the working population spends some portion of their day clicking Web icons or blue hyperlinks , and typing URL addresses.

Although Citrix provides several automated ways to deploy an access center to end users (in addition to the nonautomated method of having a user create an ICA session from Citrix Program Neighborhood), the combination of the Web Interface and Secure Gateway, and their successor, the Citrix Access Gateway, provide a secure, Web-based deployment that continues to revolutionize on-demand computing.

This chapter focuses on deploying the Citrix Access Gateway with Advanced Access Controls.

Web Interface and Secure Gateway are both included with all versions of Citrix Presentation Server. Web Interface is supported on Windows Server (2000 SP4, 2003), Red Hat Linux, and Solaris platforms. Secure Gateway is only supported on Windows 2000 Server or Windows Server 2003 platforms.

The Citrix Access Gateway is an embedded OS appliance that can be managed from Windows 2000 or above and Linux 2.4 and above platforms. When deployed with Advanced Access Controls (AAC), the AAC components must run on a Window 2000 or above server OS with Internet Information Server (IIS) and Microsoft .NET Framework. For AAC, the database server must be Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Microsoft SQL Server 7, or Microsoft SQL Desktop Edition (MSDE).