OneDrive for Business and Citrix

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I was wondering if there was anyone out there that has any experience using OneDrive and Citrix.

 

Let me give you a bit of background.  We have been mandated to move all of users personal netwrok drive over to OneDrive but we have encountered an issue a number of our Citrix applications.  These are some lagacy applications that must write various data to a UNC path (in this case the users personal network drives).  Now we do not want to use the OneDrive Sync Client as we are worried that we will quickly run out of space on our Citrix servers.

 

We had hoped that the new OneDrive on demand functionality might help with this, but it sounds like it will only be available on Win 10, and all of our Citrix Servers are running Server 2016.

 

I know that there are a several third part tools that would help us solve the issue, but again we want to avoid the additional cost if we don't have too.

 

 

5 Replies

I've put some though into this myself and didn't find a clear answer.  I did consider the following though:

 

  1. Use the OneDrive mapper tool to map a drive letter to OneDrive for Business.  It worked in testing but on my laptop now sure how well it works in a Citrix environment and with a login script given it's requirements - http://www.lieben.nu/liebensraum/onedrivemapper/
  2. Configure OneDrive for Business to only sync a single, smaller folder rather than all of the folders.

Bruce...

I am running XenApp 7.13 on Server 2012 R2 and I am currently on a Office 365 migration project.

 

I am using FSlogix as a profile management solution to mitigate issues when using .OST files for Outlook and Exchange Online.

 

Whilst FSlogix supports OD4B, I am not using it because I don't like the idea of syncing all that data locally.

 

Instead I have disabled the OD4B executable from running on my Citrix servers and instead will push users to use the the web version.

 

Even without OD4B, Office (in my case Office 2013 ISO install) can save directly to it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I would say that your only option is to map a drive directly to the Sharepoint\backend folder for each Citrix user.

 

We moved off Citrix years back but still have a Terminal Server farm. We had a similar issue, staff wanting to save files from our TS apps back to their OneDrive folder. Our solution was to map an O: drive to the "\\localhost\c$\Users\USERNAME\OneDrive - ORG NAME" folder on their computers.

 

Being a regular mapped drive, it then shows up in the Windows Explorer window in their Terminal sessions.

 

For you, you just need to discover the Windows Explorer path - then map that via a login script you only run in the Citrix environment.

 

E.g. for my OneDrive4B folder, the explorer path is;

 

https://ORGNAME-my.sharepoint.com/personal/USERNAME_ORGNAME/Documents

 

To find this path, the only browser that reveals it is Internet Explorer. In the view option, there is a 'view in File Explorer' option. This option ONLY appears in IE.

 

There's obviously a couple of variables in that URL, so finding out how to parse those to use in a script is the next challenge, or have a seperate script for each user with the exact syntax for their unique path.

 

I hope you find a working solution! As you say, you don't want to sync all that data across potentially dozens of user profiles on each server - across multiple servers! We have this same issue on our Hotdesk computers, so had to block Outlook and Syncing OneDrive to them and instruct staff to use Web Apps only.

 

I hope that helps!

Just bumping up this thread; I am wondering If there is a strategy change on deploying OneDrive for Business client on Citrix environment with Files-on-Demand feature? I assume FOD feature on W10 Fall Update will take away the sync complexity for each profile logon.

Any additional thoughts?

I am trying to install Office 365 on Citrix VDI. I could customize it and I install the application, but I am not seeing the icon which says OD4B instead it just says One Drive. I am not sure what version if you install will you see OD4B icon?

 

Also, since this being a VDI, I want to make sure that there is no SYNC from OD4B to the Virtual Destops. Instead if they want to copy it to the OD4B folder, they can copy it. So, any suggestions what version I should be using? I currently customized it with ProPlus. I was told that we have an E2 or E3 license.