Tips'n'tricks installing AA11 Citrix Remote Agent

It's been a long time i want to write this little blog post. I had some experience with Automation Anywhere 11, trying to setup it in an environment i could not create any Virtual Machine: so the only solution was to try to automate via Citrix.

Since i'm not a big fan of surface automation, as you all, i found this plugin (which is really similar to the one also UiPath have onboard... instead BluePrism lacks of this feature). 

As you can see in the following picture that is taken from here it helps you to hosts the robot machine (so you are the service provider) without installing automation software on customers data center, and the commercial promise is to use Citrix Application as local application.

Customer must install only AARemoteAgent on Citrix Servers and you have to start the Citrix Receiver before starting yout robot and everything will work fine.

 

 

But you are here because of the lesson learned, not for the commercial tips, so what i've learned from this experience?

1. Latency: programming robot using Remote Agent could be frustrating because of the latency, consider overhead in development;
2. Functionality: as you can imagine, it works quite well but it doesn't works for everything. I tested it on some custom application and the result is: more custom application = more problems, somebody could argue that is the same with local application but it's also true that with local application you have more workaround available;
   
3. Internet explorer + Citrix: nobody wrote this but if Citrix server version is < 7.15, you will never been able to use IE through Citrix RemoteAgent;
   
4. Chrome + Citrix:sometimes it doesn't work because the remote agent does not install two registry keys Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Chrome\Extensions\akaagfbdekcffpppnbajieljleihifdc and Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Google\Chrome\Extensions\akaagfbdekcffpppnbajieljleihifdc . AA supports asked customer to install Automation Anywhere also con Citrix Server but you can do it smarter, simply creating those registry keys manually on the server

Some of the things i've written in this little blog post are now in the online documentation, but since it required lot of time before discovering it, if you're on this page, maybe could be useful.