Program Neighborhood and Program Neighborhood Agent

Introduction:

Providing the best end user experience with either the full Program Neighborhood or the PN Agent. Clearly there are good reasons to use one over the other.

PN Agent is slower to enumerate large application sets when connected to a MetaFrame FR3 and Presentation Server 4.0 Farm at the same time.

So what does this mean?

Well it means only use PN Agent with Presentation Server 4.0 if your environment has large application sets to enumerate.

Apparently the XML Service in FR3 is not as performance optimized as it is in PS4.0

The PN Agent:

Benefits of using the Program Neighborhood Agent Client is that it provides centralized management of configuration settings like Server Location, Workspace Control, Authentication Domain, Passthru Authentication and many more. These settings are stored on a central Citrix Web Interface Server or Servers. These Web Interface Servers can be load balanced to serve thousands of users.

A great feature of the PN Agent Client is that you can enumerate multiple Farm application sets in the same Display Window. This feature alone can save much time (user training) in transitioning from one Citrix Farm to another, like upgrading to PS4.0.

The Full Program Neighborhood:

The full PN 32 bit client settings cannot be managed centrally like the PN Agent, instead the settings are managed individually on each PC using pn.ini and appsrv.ini files and stored in each users Windows profile.

If only Citrix would open up Active Directory Group Policy integration into the Full PN 32 bit Client. At the same time allow multiple Farm application sets to be displayed in the same folder, the same feature as the PN Agent client.


Summary:

The Full PN has been our standard for years now, it's stable, fast and reliable, but difficult to manage the settings on thousands of PC's.