If you have App-V, ThinApp, or Citrix or RDS published applications, use this trick to route from a real built-in browser to your virtual / published browser.

PolicyPak_ Browser Router with Custom Browsers

Hi. In this video I’m going to show you how you can use custom browser router routes to ensure that the right browser opens for the right time. So, the scenario might be a user might be using the built-in version of; say; Internet Explorer and they go to a website like PolicyPak.com. You always want this to fire off, not here in the built-in browser but either in an Appv4 or 5 browsers or a thin app browser or a Citrix browser. For instance, this browser is hanging out over there on the Citrix server, so it’s connecting to my Citrix server over here. It’s real easy to do this. We’ll just create a custom route. There’s really only one thing you need to know, which is how to launch from the command line and once you know that you can create a custom browser router route so I’ll just wait for this to finish here.

So, by way of example, let’s say I just right-click over to Mozilla Firefox and go to Properties, okay. What I’ll do is I will take the target here, okay, you can see it launches the Citrix ICA Client against all this stuff. Just copy that for now. You’ll come back to that in a second and let’s go ahead and create a route. So, you can say, you know, custom browser route. All right, we’ll go ahead and click edit here. You can do what I’m about to show you in either the user or computer side. That’s totally fine. I just happened to do this – I’m just going to do this demo on the user side first. So, you go to user side, Policy Pak, and we’ll go to Browser Router here. We have to create a new collection. You can put item level targeting in here. You can say, for instance, only do these things WHEN the person is on a machine that matches a computer name or is in a particular security group or the operating system is whatever.

So, we’re not going to do that here but you can get very fine-grained and say this custom route set will only take effect WHEN those conditions are true. So, now what I’ll do is I’ll create a new custom route policy and I’ll call this *Pak* and I’ll say this is a wildcard *Pak* and I want to go to my custom browser. I’m just going to paste it in. Remember, I copied it before. This is the Citrix ICA launcher for Firefox. Anytime I hit PolicyPak it will go over there and it says you better make sure that this exists on a local client or else if it doesn’t we’re going to fall back and go to Internet Explorer if we don’t see it. So, that’s the first thing. Let me go back to that machine also and let’s use Appv5 and we’ll create a custom route Appv5, so we’ll go ahead and take this version of Firefox here. Okay, this is Appv5 and let’s create one called New Policy. We’ll do this *gpa* for gp answers so we’ll go to *gpa* and this will go to gp answers.

This will go to the Appv5 version of Firefox here, okay. Go ahead and run that and then the last thing we’ll do on this machine is maybe for ThinApp what we’ll do is we’ll launch the ThinApp Firefox27 when we go to, say, VMware. So, what we need to do is we need to get it exactly right. This part is a little trickier because you might want to copy it this way, so now that you’ve got the command line exactly right here you can then go back to your GPO, create a new policy, and call this *vmware* and we’ll go back to *vmware* and we’ll make a custom route to the thin app version of Firefox. Okay? So, there we go. So, now we’ve got our custom routes. We’ll go back to our endpoint machine. We’ll run gpupdate and we’ll wait for this to finish. Okay, now that that’s done, let’s go over to our built-in browser and we’ll go to PolicyPak first and we’ll see what happens here. Now that, that is done, let’s go ahead and relaunch Internet Explorer and we’ll go over to PolicyPak.com and boom! What it’s doing is it’s rerouting. You can see it rerouted to the – no, that wasn’t – there you go. I want to make sure you can see that. So, it’s now launching the ICA Citrix version of Firefox over the network. Okay, so that worked out pretty well. Now, let’s go ahead and back in the browser that’s actually ON the machine here, we’ll go to gpanswers.com and this time it’s going to route to the Appv5 version of Firefox and I know that this is the right version actually because even though there’s nothing that’s presented to the user, the About… this is Version 27. Okay?

That’s correct and if I go to vmware, that’s going to launch, boom, the thin app version of Firefox right there. So, if you’ve got Appv4, Appv5, Thin App or Citrix, using browser router you can specifically say that when they go to the website using the built-in browsers on their machine, you will automatically launch the custom browser. Okay? That being said, we do know that if you were in the custom browser right here and you try to go back to, for instance, PolicyPak.com, this is where the routes end. We do not route from the custom browsers like thin app or Appv back outward to your original browser. So, for custom browsers like this, it is a one-way street. For custom routes for browsers that are actually installed on the machine, it will route between browsers just fine as you have seen in the previous videos. If you have any questions, we are here for you and we hope you get started with it soon. Thanks so much.