Citrix Barrier

Citrix Barrier: a reader asks…

I have a Macbook Pro at home which I use mostly for work. My office uses Citrix Winframe so I can remotely connect to the office and work – that shows my office desktop (a PC) in a window on my Mac. The problem is that I have a multi-function printer at home (HP Officejet 8600), and while that works great at scanning documents and placing the resulting PDFs on my desktop or in a Mac folder, I can’t get the PDF to show up in my office window. Copy and paste doesn’t work, nor drag and drop. Any hints?

Unfortunately, your office controls how you remotely access the office services. What they’ve done is given you a tunnel (called a VPN) from your Mac into the office where you take over control of a PC (real or virtual). That’s like being in the office, but only for the Citrix window. There’s a wall of distance between that window and the rest of your home networking environment.

Your HP scanner is connected to your home network, so your Mac can see it and trade data with it. That’s how you can get the PDF onto your Mac from the scan. But your desktop, your Mac file folders, even your Mac programs are not part of the office network that’s inside the Citrix window. So they can’t talk to each other.

It’s a little messy, but the standard workaround is for you to use Mac Mail (or Gmail or whatever email program you have on your Mac) to email the PDF to your office address. Then in the Citrix window, open your work email program and you can save the PDF to your office desktop or a file folder. Yes, it’s clunky, but it works and you don’t need anyone else to help you.

If you simply must have a connection between your home scanner and your office PC, there is a way to do this but it would require the assistance of your office’s IT department to enable. Basically, you’d have them change group policies in Citrix to enable the ‘desktop experience’ (on the XenApp server), then have them help you make sure your scanner is using the TWAIN driver (not the WIA driver), and then they would either add software to your Mac or make some setting changes to make a remote resource (like your C: drive on the office PC) visible and available to the Mac.

This would probably result in a ‘mapped drive’ on your Mac that is only active while your Citrix software is active and you’re connected to the office network. You can then direct the scan output on the HP to that drive location, and it’ll show up in the Citrix window on your office PC. Please note that this opens up some significant security holes (aka risks) for your office’s IT environment, so you may not get a lot of support for such.