MAN Transport Management Solutions

Technical note - Client Requirements

The following details minimum client requirements to use the MAN Trucknology Fleet Management system.

Map Client

The Trucknology Map Client is a Citrix published application and is launched by the user after first connecting to the Citrix farm through a browser connection. Virtually any current specification PC is capable of running the Citrix session, but for performance reasons the following are recommended as a minimum standard.

The user will connect to services at the following URL: www.trucknology.com/tms/default.asp

The above page directs the user to one of the following servers (load balancing). The users are advised not to bookmark directly to any of these as they may need to be taken out of rotation for maintenance without notice.

https://sgr1.microlise.com
https://sgr2.microlise.com
https://sgr3.microlise.com

Accessing Citrix from a web browser requires something called an ICA client. The Citrix ICA client should only needed to be downloaded once but may need Administrator rights to install.

The latest version of the client is available from www.citrix.com/downloads.

Download and install the plug-in. Depending upon the company security policy, system administration rights may be required to do this. To validate installation, there is a standalone test that may be performed:

  1. Open up a web browser and connect to www.trucknology.com/tms/default.asp
  2. At the login prompt enter a username of jsmith and a password of jsmith and click log in.
  3. If this is successful then you should be able to launch the Calculator program by clicking on its icon. This is the standard Windows Calculator running in our Citrix environment. Launch and use of the Calculator proves most of the end to end connectivity.
  4. The test is complete. Close the application and log off.

Citrix sessions are subject to timeouts and automatic disconnection of sessions after periods of no use. Please see the Technical Bulletin Citrix Client Access for additional guidance.

Citrix Bandwidth

For acceptable (although subjective) performance of the map client, we recommend that the user has 40Kbps of bandwidth available to them. This does not need to be continuous however, and will be a burst of activity followed by a much longer period of little activity (the duty cycle). The affect of others on the same connection depends on their duty cycle. It is therefore very difficult to predict how multiple users will impact each other if the overall bandwidth is constrained.

Reports

The Trucknology reporting suite is delivered to the user through a web browser. Reports are generated using SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services. No pre-configuration is required. The minimum specification for accessing the reports is as per the Citrix access (above). After logging in to the Citrix server with the user’s operating credentials, reports are made available as published links. The following URL’s are accessed by the user whilst accessing reports.

http://mmsreports.microlise.com
http://mmsreports2.microlise.com

Reports Printing

Browsers are typically poor at maintaining layout fidelity when printing. For this reason, Microsoft provide an Active-X control that takes control of the printing and print preview functions and ensures correct margins and pagination.
The first time a report is printed from the web page, the user is prompted to install the Active-X control. If the user does not have administration rights on the local machine then the install will fail. It is preferable therefore that the print client is installed in advance for the user.

The RSClientPrint application is offered by the reporting server by clicking on the print icon at the top of any report.

This page:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms159190.aspx provides additional information about installing the print client.

 

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