Five weeks ago, on the same day, I received three emails asking if I had a spreadsheet listing all the Citrix policy settings like Microsoft supplies. I replied I did not and had been asking Citrix for such an Excel file since March 2012. Someone pointed me to this Citrix article on Citrix Policy Reference but it has not been updated in three years. It also contains no data for any version of XenApp or XenDesktop 7.x. I reached out to several people at Citrix to see if such a file existed and all promised to get back to me. No one ever responded. So I started my own Excel file based on what little I had from the documentation scripts. There was so much missing information that I reached back out to my Citrix contacts because surely this information is sitting on some developer’s computer somewhere at Citrix. After pestering my Citrix contacts, I, again, never received a single response. I decided to take matters into my own hands and start a community project.

After fives weeks of hard work, we a pleased to present you with this Excel file of all the Citrix policy settings we could find and figure out. I would like to thanks the following community members for their help on this project:

• Esther Barthel (fellow CTP)
• Markus Zehnle (fellow Dallas Cowboys fan)
• Carl Behrent
• Jon Falgout

Unfortunately for us, this turned out to be a lot of manual data gathering and a lot of copy & paste.

I started out with XenApp/XenDesktop 7.13 and created the base Excel worksheet and asked the contributors for help finding all the registry information for all 409 policy settings. I then started gathering all the “Applies to” and “Description” (aka Help Text) from Studio and copying and pasting all that information. Along the way, I found numerous issues with the Descriptions. There was spelling, grammar, and punctuation issues and also factual errors. Inconsistencies in policy settings drove my OCD up the wall.

• Some settings are Enabled/Disabled and some are Allowed/Prohibited.
• Some settings that have drop-down lists start with the first item in the list as item 0 but some start with 1.
• Some settings have the drop-down lists in alphabetical order but some don’t.
• Some settings explain what Enabled/Allowed and Disabled/Prohibited do. Some just say “This setting will be Enabled/Allowed/Disabled/Prohibited”.
• Some settings that are in obvious groupings have the same Description text even though the text has nothing to do with the policy setting.
• The “Applies to” data in a Studio policy setting is very different than the same setting in the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC). GPMC is more accurate.

All the spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors I reported to Citrix are fixed in the Excel file. My OCD would not allow me to keep those errors in something I am helping create.

Once Esther, Markus and Carl found the majority of registry settings, I created an Active Directory-based policy that had all 409 settings configured. I then had to manually document every possible registry value and what that value represented in Studio. Needless to say, that took a long time because of the inconsistencies noted above. By the way, booting a Windows 10 VM with 409 Citrix policy settings takes a long time and then the logon takes minutes. I do not recommend trying that in production.

There is only one policy setting we could not find:

• Server Settings\Offline Applications\Offline app client trust.

There are ten worksheets in the Excel file:

1. Contributors
2. Instructions
3. Computer Policy Settings
4. User Policy Settings
5. All Policy Settings
6. Receiver (receiver.admx)
7. FAS (CitrixFederatedAuthenticationServices.admx)
8. UPM (ctxprofile5.7.0.admx)
9. ShareFile (ShareFileSync.admx)
10. CQI (CitrixCQI.admx)

If you find any errors or omissions, please send an email to webster@carlwebster.com.

We hope you find the Excel file with all the policy settings and Citrix related ADMX files useful.

You can always find the most current Excel file by going to https://www.carlwebster.com/where-to-get-copies-of-the-documentation-scripts/

Thanks

Webster, Esther, Markus, Carl and Jon