How does Captivate work in a Citrix environment?

We have projects available to our Citrix users. To make this work, we placed an icon on the Citrix menu page that takes our users to the Intranet site we use for our CBT material. They then can access the CBT in the same manner as those who access the Intrantet via their desktop. There seems to be a slight denigration in the sound quality, other than that, it seems to be working well.

>I recently ran a test executing a captivate3 simulation in flash via
>citrix.
> All data resided directly on the blade. The test ran fine without
> performance
> degredation for our off shore locations with a minimal # of users logged
> onto
> the blade (2), however when we went to 4 or 5 we hit 100% CPU
> utilization.The
> machine has 4 dual core processors..so I was surprised to see what a hog
> the
> sims were running in flash. Does any have a suggestion on how to improve
> performance? Alternatives? Thanks.
>


This is a 'feature' of many multimedia technology - including Flash,
Director (Shockwave) and Authorware. In the interest of performance, the
application *requests* the maximum possible amount of CPU time. Windows is
supposed to then organise any running applications so that they share
resources fairly.

It seems, however, that Citrix does not fully support sharing resources as
your complaint is a common one.

So far as I have gathered, you can improve performance by partitioning the
CPUs and/or RAM. I've never administered Citrix so I don;t know just exactly
how to to that, but hopefully it makes sense to your admin :-)


Steve


--
Adobe Community Expert: eLearning, Mobile and Devices
European eLearning Summit - EeLS
Adobe-sponsored eLearning conference.
http://www.elearningsummit.eu

I recently ran a test executing a captivate3 simulation in flash via citrix. All data resided directly on the blade. The test ran fine without performance degredation for our off shore locations with a minimal # of users logged onto the blade (2), however when we went to 4 or 5 we hit 100% CPU utilization.The machine has 4 dual core processors..so I was surprised to see what a hog the sims were running in flash. Does anyone have a suggestion on how to improve performance? Alternatives? Thanks.

Hi chiasurf,

Would you happen to know if Captivate 2 actually recorded the screen events? Or were the screen states simple, individual screen shots dropped into individual Captivate 2 slides?

If the former, were there any special settings on the CITRIX server/configuration?


Thank you,

TPK

I did some work a bit back using Captivate v.2 for a large company & one of the applications was Citrix based. All worked fine & the product came out well.

The client was accessing several applications via a Citrix interface (Excel, IE, etc.).

My experience is that Captivate does not play well in a Citrix environment. My belief is that Citrix does not pass along the Windows application event notifications that Captivate monitors to know when to do it's magic. Granted, we did not try to tweak Citrix to try to get it to work, but based on past experience I doubt it would have made any difference.

When recording a remote application using a copy of Captivate installed on my local workstation, the best Captivate could do was capture most of the screens, but with none of the other stuff that makes Captivate so useful (captions, click boxes, highlight boxes). That all had to be added after the fact by hand.

We ended up installing local copies of the necessary applications on our individual workstations, and Captivate worked fine. If necessary, you might get away with keeping everything on the Citrix server and physically sitting at the Citrix box to develop. Do bear in mind, however, that Captivate uses quite a bit of resources, especially when compiling projects for preview and publishing. This could be a problem in a production Citrix environment.

As to your question about licensing, section 2.3 of the Adobe Capivate 2 license seems to indicate that you must install a separate copy for each person who will access Captivate. It appears to explicitly disallow shared application use based on a concurrent number of random users.

Hi miaowmiaow,

I have not had the chance to use Captivate through CITRIX, but I would be surprised if it worked well. I seem to remember reading in some of the literature (might be Captivate 1 literature) that Captivate is processor and write intensive and that using a shared drive to access .cp files could be problematic (much less using CITRIX). This means that the program works best when located on a dedicated machine and writing to that machine's hard drive.

If I were thinking of locating the program on a CITRIX server, knowing that I could have a (time out) inturruption periodically in the connection between server and client, I would thoroughly test a single copy of Captivate first (with a single user) and look for problems with latency, timing, file corruption and anyting else I might expect while working through CITRIX.

I am unsure of the licensing issues with CITRIX.

TPK