- Introducing HDX optimization for Microsoft Teams. Now organizations can centrally deploy Microsoft Teams within their virtual environments and deliver a full.
- HKCU SOFTWARE Microsoft Office 16.0 Common Identity. But I am afraid that this could have negative effects on using other Office 365 features in this Citrix farm, like PowerBI, Teams, etc. Is it really true that Microsoft does not support Office 2016 installed in Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop environments? Best regards, Oscar Gil.
- Everywhere connectivity on every device. Introducing Citrix HDX optimization for Microsoft Teams. Now organizations can deploy Microsoft Teams within their virtual environments, delivering a fully-featured Microsoft Teams experience, and also give IT admins the benefits of centralized management.
Microsoft Teams has risen quite emphatically to prominence over the last six months or so. The reason for this is twofold – primarily, to do with the explosion of remote working that has occurred as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and also with the coincidence of the Skype for Business retirement date in August of 2020.
Average time to read:4minutesHow I tricked the HdxBrowserCef.exe (Chrome Browser) process into presenting itself as an Edge Browser enabling the best of both worlds.
This is a guest post, written by Dennis Smith.
We needed to be able to make a Microsoft Teams video call via our VDI. But since the Citrix HDX optimization for Microsoft Teams is still not released, my chances of getting it to work were slim to say the least. But I’m one of those people who won’t take ‘no’ for an answer.
The situation
Our organization uses, like many production environments do, the Citrix Virtual Workspace 7.15 LTSR CU3. We host a VDI and make the VM’s available via a Netscaler.
We thought, maybe we can get it to work usingthe browser (teams.microsoft.com) and Citrix ‘Browser Content Redirection 2.0’,using Fernando Klurfan’s guide here;
We had set up the environment and contentredirection with YouTube worked.
Under the hood
A close inspection on how this system really works was needed to find a solution to our problem. Just like flash redirection a few years ago, I know that the URL that has to be displayed is passed on via the ICA client, ahhum, sorry, I mean the Workspace App, of course.
On the client side, Citrix uses theHdxBrowserCef.exe to render the pages locally.
This immediately raised some questions, whatdoes CEF stand for?
After setting the necessary policies/reg keysto enable redirection, as shown below;
And installing the Chrome extension;
We were able to successfully run teams locally, and everything worked…
Except video calling.
No video calling using Chrome, no Browser redirection using Edge
Install Microsoft Teams On Citrix Client
It seems that browser video calling is notpossible using Chrome, I don’t know why, because technically it’s not an issue,at all. I know that Microsoft Teams in-browser video conferencing on Edgeworks. Must be a political thing. Apparently, on the server side Microsoftchecks what browser you’re using and only allows Edge browsers to do videoconferencing. However, the issue remains, Edge does not support browserredirection.
After some tests, I found that Chrome could befooled into presenting itself as if it was Edge by setting the User Agent to aEdge identifier. Using shift-control i,and select, network conditions, User agent;
Now if I could only fool the local browser inpresenting itself with a Edge user agent. The local browser is in this case isthe ‘HdxBrowserCef.exe’, it comes with the Citrix Workspace App (Receiver).
Further inspection on the HdxBrowserCef.exerevealed that it uses the open source lib called Chromium Embedded Framework(CEF). It does not use the local Google Chrome. Now we know what CEF stands forin HdxBrowserCef.exe.
The question is, is it possible for CEF tochange the user agent, and does CEF support webcam access?
Yes, it is, and here’s how!
and;
(source https://ourcodeworld.com/articles/read/425/how-to-enable-webrtc-access-camera-and-microphone-for-cefsharp-in-winforms)
But to re-write the whole HdxBrowserCef.exe isa bridge too far, we only needed it to present itself as Edge.
I started searching for User Agent strings in the Citrix Workspace App folder that holds the HdxBrowserCef.exe. And found it in the ‘libcef.dll’. We dove into the file using a hex editor (https://hexed.it/), searched for ‘mozilla’, because that’s in all User Agent strings;
Changed this into;
Adding an Edge user string to the User Agentstring. Saved the .dll, and tested this using www.whatismybrowser.comto see if we successfully fooled the HdxBrowserCef.exe into presenting itselfas Edge. And it worked! Notice that strings are stored using &h00 as ‘endof string’, and &h20 as ‘space’.
The next test was, will in-browser Teams videocalling work?, the icon was there so it looked promising.
After a few video calls, I concluded thiswork-around works. Please keep in mind that using this setup every redirectedweb-page, including youtube, will be requested as Edge.
Dennis Smith – Gourami.eu
Disclaimer: this article is intended as atechnical proof of concept. We do not recommend doing this yourself.
Install Microsoft Teams On Citrix App