Subtitles of the Movie

This is Citrix Access Gateway Advanced Edition 4.5 and in this video we're going to give an overview of resources. Resources are existing entities on your protected internal network. They are Internet websites, they are file shares, they may be Citrix Presentation Server Web Interfaces. They may be workstations that you can access directly or indirectly but all of these are considered resources and these are the entities that the Access Gateway gives you secure access to, hence the name. Resources are the basic building block of the Citrix Access Gateway Infrastructure. We're taking a bottom up approach in this course, so we're going to start with the resources and we'll build upon those resources until we have a fully functioning Access Server Farm at which point we'll go through a lab and then do some advanced scenarios based upon certain criteria. Resources are items that users already have access to. The Citrix Access Gateway does not grant users extra rights to resources that they don't already have. They already have to access to the resources through either file system permissions or website permissions before you can publish them using the Citrix Access Gateway and to be really honest they don't have to have access to them but if you publish it and they don't have access, they'll get an access denied message. So it's important to remember that users must already have access to the resources in question. Most of the resources that you publish in this manner therefore will be resources that users already use on a daily basis. For example, File Shares immediately come to mind and these may be File Shares that the users access everyday, they have their local documents redirected to and in that case you can publish that file share resource to the Access Gateway and grant these users access to the File Share resource from anywhere they happen to have a computer. One of the nice things about the Citrix Access Gateway is that you can get very granular with the access to the resources through the Advanced Access Gateway. For example you can say these user can access this resource but only between this date and time if their on this particular client device that meets criteria A, B and C. We'll visit some of those advanced scenarios elsewhere in the course when we do our lab. First off we'll talk about Web Resources. Web Resources are pretty much what you think they are based on the name. Web Resources provides access to internal or external websites or to a Citrix Web Interface inside the Access Gateway Portal. By using Web Resources you can control access to internal websites and external websites based upon the logged in user. All of the web resources are controlled by administrator, meaning that you set up the web resource, you define where the users can go and they can't stray outside of that. In fact you'll notice when we show you how the user interface is to the web resource, you'll notice that the URL is even obviated so the users can't really even tell what web site their on, other then the content that's in the browser window they happen to have open. As I said they're controlled by the administrator, they are published to the Advanced Access Interface for in users to use and as we mentioned you can restrict a user to a specific site or a collection of sites. Next, we'll talk about File Share Resources. Again very straight forward, File Share Resources allows access to Network Files and Folders through a web browser. These File Share Resources are configured as UNC paths, again since the users aren't officially logging into the Domain through the web browser drive letters really have no meaning whatsoever. In fact if you try to set up a File Share Resource using a Drive Letter the Access Gateway Interface barks at you and says no you can't do that. Doing that would have unpredictable results as you can imagine, you have a File Share Resource that say pointed to Drive Q. Drive Q could be mapped somewhere differently on one web client verses another web client. So keep in mind that when you set up Web Resources you always have to have the UNC path to that resource available to you and that's not to say they can't be on a Microsoft DFS File Share but again that's outside the scope of this course. It's important to remember that File Share resources in the Access Gateway Advanced Edition don't provide anymore rights then the File System Access already allows. You're not granting them rights to the File Systems, you're merely giving them access to the file systems through a web browser. And to make your life as an administrator a little easier you can use tokens as part of the UNC Path that you define for the File Share Resources. These tokens can include the users logged in user id, the user's full name or really any kind of Active Directory variable that it makes sense to use. There is a whole list of them in the Administrative Guide. We'll go over a few of them as we're setting up File Share Resources, but again you can read that outside the scope of this course.